Although history standards generally aim at developing historical consciousness among secondary school students, there is not much research-based knowledge to support making connections between the past, the present, and the future in history teaching. This study examines the effects of teaching analogous cases of an enduring human issue in 2 experimental conditions: 1 in which grade 10-12 students (n ¼ 460) were actively encouraged to compare cases and to draw analogies with the present and 1 in which students studied cases without making comparisons or drawing analogies with the present (n ¼ 273). Set against the results of a group of students who followed the usual history curriculum (n ¼ 289), multilevel regression analyses on the collected data revealed that both experimental conditions positively affected students' appraisals of the relevance of history, more so in the case-comparison condition than in the separate-case condition. Students in the case-comparison condition also deemed the lesson course more valuable and experienced less difficulty with the applied pedagogical approach than students in the separate-case condition. Case comparison did not negatively affect the acquisition of historical factual knowledge. Implications for further research are discussed.Developing historical consciousness is an important rationale for history as a school subject in
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.