Narratives of Students About Violence and Armed Conflict in Colombia Tools to Assess the Development of Historical Thinking

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate secondary school students' historical thinking abilities through their narratives about violence and armed conflict in Colombia. Two hundred and forty students wrote a narrative about violence and armed conflict in Colombia. A statistical analysis was carried out in three stages: a descriptive one to prepare a detailed account of the data, an analysis of Pearson correlations to establish distributions between the variances and significant relations between the variables, and an ordered Logit model to obtain probability estimates between the variables and identify the influence or relative effect of the factors on them. The results emphasize the importance of the teaching of history, mainly because the diverse views of historical processes have been a source of social division between groups and individuals with different historical experiences that have triggered confrontations when trying to impose a vision of the conflict as the only true one.