ABSTRACT
Research in history education aims to understand the subjects’ historical thinking at meta-historical and substantive levels. Its main focus is the ideas of the agents involved in learning within formal education contexts. In a methodological perspective, both systematic and action-research studies in that field have mainly followed essentially qualitative approaches with an additional quantitative data analysis. The article discusses procedures and results of some studies carried out in Portugal in the light of methodological options and concepts entangled in the nature of history.
Keywords:
Qualitative methods in historical cognition; Epistemology and methodology in research; Inductive data analysis; Conceptual progression in history education.