Explaining the Third Reich: Swedish students' causal reasoning about the Nazi seizure of power in Germany

Abstract

The topic of this study is how Swedish students aged 15–16 use causal reasoning in history when given a high‐stakes task about explaining a historically significant event, the rise of the Nazi regime in Germany. The study is based on student texts from the Swedish national test in history. The student texts are mainly analysed with regards to how many, and what kinds of, causal factors are used by the students. The study finds that while most students are able to combine agents and situational factors in their explanations, the explanations show a recurring theme of combining a generic sense of economic crisis with Hitler and the German people as the important agents, to the detriment of other causes that could open up for different interpretations of why the Nazi regime came to power. To counteract this, the study suggests increased emphasis on some contextual factors in teaching practices.

Qualifying counterfactuals: Students' use of counterfactuals for evaluating historical explanations

“…Alternatively, an answer might specify certain actors or traits necessary for the substitute to be able to replace the actor (or, conversely, be used to argue that the actor was irreplaceable). A specific statement, as opposed to a vague or generic one, is thus more qualified, since it becomes in principle possible to verify or refute it in relation to the historical context (see Barton, 2008;Samuelsson and Wendell, 2017;Wendell, 2018). Context sensitivity, understood here as specificity, needs to be applicable to both structure and actor when applied to counterfactuals.…”

“…(6)(7)(8)(9) In this case, the text refers to the policies of the 1930s and of the Second World War, as well as to Hitler's legacy, as an argument for Hitler's causal importance for 1933, indicating confusion between causes and consequences. This tendency to include later historical events, especially the Second World War and the Holocaust, occurs in several texts, and may indicate problems with the chosen explanandum: the Nazi regime is so inherently associated with these events that several students struggle with separating them when engaging with the assignment (see Barton, 2008;Wendell, 2018). However, cases such as this also indicate that the students producing them are struggling with understanding the concepts of cause and consequence.…”