Abstract
One of the important aspects of the history learning is to learn lessons from historical events and to make use of them in the present life. However, current history learning focuses on knowing historical events, not discovering lessons. Our research introduces the learning activity of the lesson discovery into the history learning in order to understand the importance of acquiring living knowledge from history. We call this learning the “learning from history.” Lesson discovery needs complicate knowledge process: generalization of individual historical events, understanding causal relationships between historical events, and noticing similarities between them. This study proposes a learning process for promoting the lesson discovery which consists of 4 steps. In addition, a learning support system is developed which provides the interface that decreases the difficulty of this learning process and leads learners for the successful lesson discovery. Experimental results indicated that the lesson discovery learning with our system was positively accepted by the learners, which makes them realize this learning meaningful and useful. In addition, our system was able to give appropriate scaffolding of this learning process to the learners and effectively promote them to discover lessons.
