What do students know and understand about the Holocaust?

26
Methodology
were asked questions such as: ‘Approximately
how many Jews in all of Europe were killed during
the Holocaust?’ A list of possible answers was
presented and students were asked to select
the correct one. Each of these questions was
accompanied by a confidence question, where
students were asked to indicate their level of
confidence in the answer they selected, using the
following four-point Likert scale, in which:
1 = I don’t know the answer – this was just a guess
2 = I am not very confident in the answer
3 = I am fairly confident in the answer
4 = I am very confident in this answer.
The confidence questions provided an indication
of what students thought they knew about the
Holocaust. This meant it was possible to determine
whether correct answers reflected students’ genuine
knowledge, rather than simply being an auspicious
guess, and also whether students’ incorrect answers
to the knowledge questions were due to fixed
misconceptions. The follow-up confidence question
was also used with the three questions requiring
free-text responses.
Eleven of the substantive knowledge questions
asked students to choose the one correct answer
from a list (survey questions 38, 44, 46, 48, 50, 52,
58, 60, 62, 64, 66). Students’ accuracy across these
questions was examined by calculating how many
they answered correctly. This gave each student
a total score from 0 (they answered all questions
incorrectly) to 11 (they answered all questions
correctly). This also enabled us to calculate the mean
of the total scores for each year group so that we
could examine differences between groups.
A total score for students’ level of confidence
across the substantive knowledge questions was
also calculated. Students’ scores ranged from 11
(they reported they had guessed all of their answers)
to 44 (they were very confident in all of their answers).
Recognition of people/places/events
Students were provided with a list of 20 people,
places and events, and asked to identify which of
them were related to the Holocaust by ticking ‘yes’,
‘no’ or ‘don’t know’ (13 words were relevant and
7 were not). (Survey question 31)
Recognition of images
Six images related to the Holocaust were examined
(survey questions 32 to 37). They were:
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the entrance to Auschwitz concentration camp
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Anne Frank
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a film still from The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas
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Adolf Hitler
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an identification tattoo on the arm of a former
Auschwitz prisoner
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the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe
in Berlin.
The question-skip facility was used in the online
version of the survey so that students were first
asked if they recognised what was being shown
in the image. If they said they did not recognise
it, the next image was presented. If they said they
did recognise it, they were presented with four
options for what the image could be showing and
asked to pick the correct one. In the paper version
of the survey, students were only shown the list of
options and were not first asked whether or not they
recognised what was being shown in the image.
Key words
Students were asked if they recognised five key
terms: ‘racism’, ‘antisemitism’, ‘Islamophobia’,
‘homophobia’, and ‘genocide’ (survey questions 24
to 28). In the online survey, using the question-skip
facility, when students said they recognised a word
they were presented with a corresponding list of four
definitions and had to select the correct definition.
In the paper version, where the question-skip facility
could not be used, students were only presented
with the definitions (so were not first asked whether
or not they recognised the word).
Experiences of learning about the
Holocaust
Students were asked whether all students should
learn about the Holocaust in school (response
options: ‘Yes’; ‘No’; ‘Don’t know’) and whether
they themselves had learned about the Holocaust
in school (response options: ‘Yes, definitely’;
‘Yes, I think so’; ‘Maybe’; ‘No, I don’t think so’;
‘No, definitely not’) (survey questions 68 and 69).
Students who had learned about the Holocaust
in school were asked to:
■■
indicate what year group they were in when
they first learned about the Holocaust
■■
identify the subject(s) where they had learned
about it
■■
say whether or not they had learned about
the Holocaust since September 2013 (that is,
during the school year in which the survey was
completed – survey questions 70 to 72).
Students were then asked if they had heard about
the Holocaust outside of school (response options:
‘Yes, definitely’; ‘Yes, I think so’; ‘Maybe’; ‘No, I don’t
think so’; ‘No, definitely not’) (survey question 73).
They were also asked to indicate if they had read
any books about the Holocaust (response options: