Ordering History Through the Timeline

18 Pages Posted: 11 Dec 2017

Multiple version iconThere are 2 versions of this paper

Date Written: December 7, 2017

Abstract

History is a key subject in most educational system in Western countries, and there is ongoing concern about the degree of historical knowledge and historical sensibility that students obtain after their high school graduation. This paper proposes a simple linetime test for quantitatively measuring a human sense of history. The paper reports the results of the test administered to approximately 250 Italian university students. There are two empirical results. First, students have remarkable difficulties in ordering basic events over the time line, with the largest mistakes observed around the events that took place in the Middle Age. Second, the paper uncovers a statistical regularity in the test performance across gender, with female subjects featuring a statistical significant and quantitatively sizable downward score. The gender difference is surprising, since existing literature on differences in cognitive abilities across gender suggests that female subjects outperform male subjects in memory related tests. The paper shows also that the gender difference survives to a variety of sub periods, and falls by only 15 percent when we distinguish between violent and non-violent events.

Keywords: Sense of Time, Gender Differences

JEL Classification: I12

Suggested Citation

Garibaldi, Eugenio and Garibaldi, Pietro, Ordering History Through the Timeline (December 7, 2017). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3084285 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3084285

Eugenio Garibaldi

Bocconi University ( email )

Via Sarfatti, 25
Milan, MI 20136
Italy

Pietro Garibaldi (Contact Author)

University of Turin ( email )

218 bis
Corso Unione Sovietica
Torino, 10134
Italy

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