A Study on the Student Activities Using Historical Sources in World History Textbooks for Contemporary History Education

This paper aims to reveal the characteristics and significance of contemporary history education and to evoke the importance of contemporary history education and historical sources learning. For this, I discussed the importance of historical sources to be dealt with in contemporary history classes and how to utilize it in textbooks.BR In addition, this study examined the characteristics of the use of historical sources and student activities in the contemporary history unit of the four world history textbooks in Korea. For comparison, this paper also studied the case of student activities using historical sources of two American world history textbooks.BR It is important to know that there are different perspectives on historical facts through historical sources learning and that various assessments and judgments is possible. Therefore, we need to form an activity task that will not only include historical sources in textbooks, but also experience the process of reading it directly and thinking historically.