Effects of Operational Thinking in Reading a Text upon Rectifying a History Misconception

Abstract

Magara (1993) showed that many undergraduates had the misconception that in the Edo period the Tokugawas shogunate collected a land tax from daimyos (feudal rulers). This study dealt with such a misconception. In the textbooks used in high school, the following content is described. "The shogunate made daimyo give up a certain amount of rice as tax on their territories during 9 years in the Edo period. This system is called Agemai-no-sei" (We call the content of the first sentence proposition A.) Proposition A implies that the shogunate did not collected a land tax from daimyos for the rest of the 9 years in the Edo period (We call this content proposition B.) In experiment 1 (N=62), it was suggested that subjects who abandoned the misconception could transform proposition A into proposition B. In experiment 2 (N=34), we taught subjects that proposition A could be transformed into proposition B. As a result, most of them could abandon the misconception. Those results were discussed from the standpoint of operational thinking proposed by Kudo (2010).