When we look back at our own schooling, many of us remember the history textbook as a constant companion. It structured lessons, framed what was important, and often carried an aura of authority. But as researchers, we began to wonder: How do students themselves actually experience these books? And what does that mean for how they learn to think about history?

This curiosity led us to conduct a study with first-semester university students, asking them to reflect on their experiences with history textbooks during their upper secondary years in Austria. It was, in many ways, a retrospective exercise – an invitation to recall classroom practices, to think about how often textbooks were used, and to consider how they were understood.

What made this project different was not only the perspective we sought, but also the method we chose. For the first time in history education research, we applied Latent Profile Analysis (LPA). This approach allows us to look beneath the surface of survey responses and detect hidden patterns – profiles that show how different ways of using and interpreting textbooks cluster together. For us, this felt like a new lens, a way of seeing complexity that might otherwise remain invisible.

The results were both expected and thought-provoking. Textbooks were indeed used less frequently in upper secondary schools than in earlier grades, yet they still held a central role. More striking, however, was what the LPA revealed: students do not form a single, uniform group of textbook users. Instead, their engagement splits into distinct patterns – some leaning towards textbooks as repositories of knowledge, others treating them as interpretive narratives that invite questioning.

We do not see these profiles as final answers. Rather, they are starting points – signs that textbook use is far more diverse, and perhaps more consequential, than often assumed. They also raise deeper questions: What encourages students to move from passive use to critical engagement? How do their beliefs about the nature of history shape this journey?

For us, the most important insight is not the specific clusters we identified, but the simple fact that such profiles exist. History textbooks are not neutral tools; they are embedded in the ways students learn to understand the past. And with methods like LPA, we can begin to uncover the subtle dynamics of that process.

We hope that our study encourages you to take an interest in this new approach and contributes to further advancing textbook research.

Students’ use and perception of history textbooks in Grades 9 to 13: a retrospective study revealing general insights and latent profiles by Ulrike Kipman (Pedagogical University of Salzburg, Austria) and Christoph Kühberger (University of Salzburg, Austria) is published in History Education Research Journal, volume 21.

Ulrike Kipman is a Professor of Psychology at the University College of Teacher Education in Salzburg. She studied mathematics, psychology, education, and law at the University of Salzburg. She earned her doctorates in 2007, 2008, and 2014 in the natural sciences, law, and the humanities. Her current research focuses on problem-solving, combinatorics, personality traits, and decision-making.
Image © Daniela Gruber

Christoph Kühberger is a Professor of History Education and Civic Education at the University of Salzburg. He studied History and Italian (teacher training program) at the University of Salzburg and the Università degli Studi di Perugia. He received his PhD in 2003 in the field of New Cultural History at the University of Salzburg. His current research focuses on Digital Humanities, decolonization of historical knowledge, historical culture and historical thinking.
Image © Luigi Caputo

historical thinking history education epistemic beliefs historical understanding critical thinking textbook secondary school empirical research