Training future primary teachers in historical thinking through error-based learning and learning analytics

Current pedagogical trends move towards the implementation of active methodologies; however, little research has been conducted in the field of history teaching. Purely memorised learning no longer has a place in today’s age of information and technology. Simulating the role of historians in the classroom, what is known as promoting historical thinking, makes more sense. Thus, training teachers on how to develop historical thinking by active methodologies such as error-based learning (EBL) becomes necessary. Moreover, the traditional summative test does not demonstrate the assessment of the level of historical thinking. Nevertheless, technology enables formative assessment by different techniques and tools such as learning analytics (LA). Then, to analyse the potential of combining EBL and LA to foster and evaluate historical thinking can be interesting. To this end, in the present quantitative quasi-experimental study, the impact of EBL and LA to encourage and assess historical thinking skills have been analysed with 107 pre-service teachers. To this end, while 66 students worked with EBL with sources where errors were introduced in a controlled way, the other 41 students worked with the same unmodified sources. At the end of each session, LA was used to analyse the students’ level of knowledge in the six dimensions of historical thinking through interactive questionnaires. The results obtained show an improvement in the historical thinking of future teachers due to the use of EBL. Furthermore, it has been proven that the data obtained from the LA enables predicting the results obtained by the students in a later test. In this way, the usefulness of active methodologies such as EBL combined with LA in the training of future teachers in our area of knowledge contrasts with the methods currently used.