Historical empathy can longitudinally predict adolescent students’ history achievement via classroom engagement

In the context that many students have been fed up with rote learning or mechanical learning in history, this three-wave longitudinal study with one-year intervals examined the potential role of historical empathy in facilitating history learning. A sample of 821 middle school students participated (aged from 11 to 15 years, M = 13.47 years, SD = 0.64). Results indicated that historical empathy positively predicted students’ classroom engagement in history, which further positively predicted students’ history achievement. More specifically, both cognitive historical empathy and affective historical empathy could be longitudinally associated with cognitive, affective, behavioural, and agentic classroom engagement, respectively. Each of the four facets of history classroom engagement could be longitudinally associated with history achievement, respectively. These findings empirically validated the positive role of history empathy in improving history learning and suggested that it may be a promising way to change the current status quo of history learning by cultivating students’ historical empathy.