Inquiry-based history instruction requires students to construct historical interpretations through the critical analysis of sources, enabling them to reflect meaningfully on the past and its relevance to the present. While historical inquiry has gain...
Inquiry-based history instruction requires students to construct historical interpretations through the critical analysis of sources, enabling them to reflect meaningfully on the past and its relevance to the present. While historical inquiry has gained curricular significance both globally and in Korea, it remains challenging to enact in classrooms. Existing instructional practices continue to favor lecture-based teaching, and history teachers often struggle to transform inquiry from an abstract ideal into a structured and feasible instructional design. This dissertation addresses these challenges by examining how preservice history teachers perform historical inquiry and design inquiry-based instruction, with the goal of identifying the capacities, judgments, and instructional reasoning that underpin their work.
Specifically, this study explores how Korean preservice history teachers perform historical inquiry and how they translate this experience into the design of a one-period inquiry-based instructional sequence. Seventeen preservice teachers from five teacher education programs in Seoul participated in a task-based interview study. Participants first analyzed six primary sources on the Donghak Peasant Movement and constructed historical interpretations. They then designed a corresponding inquiry lesson, followed by in-depth interviews to examine their decision-making processes. The study collected additional data on participants’ prior knowledge, perceptions of history and school history, and prior teaching experiences. The concept of Pedagogical Design Capacity (PDC) was used to analyze how participants interpreted resources, structured instruction, and incorporated inquiry elements into their designs.
The analysis identified three types of inquiry performance—systematic, partial, and fragmented—based on the coherence and integration of five key cognitive elements: sourcing, appraising, specifying, constructing, and arguing. Lesson designs were categorized into six types: information retrieval, single-source analysis, multiple-perspective interpretation, contextualization, comparative analysis, and evidence-based argumentation.
A degree of alignment was found between the quality of inquiry performance and the complexity of lesson design: systematic inquirers were more likely to design comparative or argumentative lessons that engaged students in reasoning with evidence. However, some inconsistencies emerged, particularly when strong inquirers designed overly simplified instructional sequences.
The study also revealed that differences in lesson design were shaped by three factors: (1) preservice teachers’ procedural knowledge and epistemological understanding of historical inquiry, (2) their perceptions of school history, and (3) their understandings of students’ historical thinking. Notably, two participants demonstrated sophisticated views of student learning and strategically adjusted lesson structures to foster engagement in historical reasoning.
Based on these findings, the study offers three key implications for teacher education. First, preservice teachers require structured support to develop procedural knowledge of historical inquiry and a disciplinary understanding of historical knowledge. Second, teacher education should provide opportunities to critically examine and reconstruct teachers’ beliefs about school history and to help them translate these beliefs into sound instructional decisions. Third, teachers must be equipped with the pedagogical design capacity to diagnose and interpret students’ historical understanding and to translate that knowledge into coherent instructional decisions. This includes not only recognizing students’ cognitive needs and learning trajectories but also structuring instructional resources, tasks, and questions in ways that meaningfully support historical reasoning.
This research contributes to the field of history education by demonstrating that designing inquiry-based lessons is not simply a matter of including activities or materials, but requires teachers to engage in complex judgments about content, pedagogy, and student learning. It also calls for a long-term, developmental approach to building preservice teachers’ capacity to enact inquiry as both an instructional structure and an educational goal.