The effect that can be gained through the exhibit learning in the museum is enormous. In addition to intelligent satisfaction, emotional affluence, emotional stability, and learner s thinking ability can be improved. Among them, historical thinking ability can be seen as an effect through the learning of exhibits.
In this paper, we propose the components of historical thinking considering characteristics in museums as time change , causal relation , historical imagination , value judgment , and examined what kind of thinking ability can be cultivated through museum education. And I designed an educational program to investigate how the narrative explanation method in education affects the understanding of history of middle school high school students.
A total of 28 students were taught three times at the National Museum of Korea. The results of the qualitative analysis of the activities performed by the students before the class, during the exhibition, and after the class are as follows.
First, exhibit learning in the museum positively changed the students historical thinking ability. In other words, the ratio of the upper and middle grades increased and the lower grades decreased.
Second, the narrative explanation method improved the student s historical thinking ability as a whole, but it was found to have more influence on causality , historical imagination and value judgment .
Third, causality and historical imagination were the areas with higher level of improvement by narrative explanation method, and value judgment was the area where overall improvement was high.
Fourth, because the class using narrative reveals the voice of the students, it confirms that the students understand, discover and reinvent the contents through their own interpretation and value judgment.
In the museum exhibit learning, the narrative expression method was suitable to understand the artifacts and grasp the age. It also enabled historical imagination of artifacts and allowed the student to voice his voice, reconstructing his own meaning and creating his own historical narrative. Therefore, narrative narration in museums is more effective in cultivating the historical thinking of secondary students.