Abstract
There is a growing interest in the historical thinking skill of analyzing historical causation from various educational perspectives in high school. However, there is no lesson plan that flexibly fosters the historical thinking skill at middle level high school, where students’ historical thinking skills in history are varied. In this study, we developed an a la carte style flipped classroom to foster the historical thinking skill of analyzing historical causation in an era that can be studied from various perspectives. This enables middle level high school students to learn about important topics from that era individually. Various online movies were prepared based on students’ interests in the era, and they were then combined with a group-based analysis of historical causation in class. The evaluation of this teaching method revealed that students were able to significantly improve their historical thinking skills after the lesson practice (p < .01) with a middle range effect size. Moreover, although a wide range in students’ historical thinking skills from low to high levels were apparent at the pre-lesson test, 25 out of 26 students had acquired more than middle level historical thinking skill by the post-lesson test. In addition to addressing the diversity of interest of the students, the evaluation results also indicated that their interests in the history of the era increased significantly (p < .01) with a low to middle effect size.
