2016

Rantala, Jukka; Veijola, Anna

The most recent Finnish history curricula both at elementary and secondary level emphasise historical literacy, i.e. students’ ability to work with historical sources and to analyse and produce valid interpretations. Adolescents should learn to read and analyse documents and use historical information to create evidence-based arguments. Historically literate adolescents should also understand how historical information is created and be able to gather and evaluate information about the past. This article presents a study examining the historical literacy skills of 86 Finnish high school students from three schools in the Helsinki metropolitan area and Turku region. We used a document-based task to acquire knowledge about their historical literacy skills. Our data indicates that students’ historical literacy skills were satisfactory in two high schools and insufficient in the third. The schools with a satisfactory level were high-ranking high schools while the one with an unsatisfactory level was average in ranking. In the school with an unsatisfactory level in particular, students’ difficulties in general literacy skills were reflected in deficiencies in disciplinary literacy skills. Also, the historical literacy skills of many students at high-ranking schools proved to be defective. This is most likely due to the content-based tradition in history teaching. Based on our study, reaching the aims of educating multiliterate citizens as stated in the national curriculum, a strong emphasis on the teaching of historical literacy is needed.