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The purpose of history education in Austria has changed over at least the last decade. While the focus used to be to give students a master narrative of the national past based on positivist knowledge, the current objective of history education is to foster historical thinking processes that enable students to form transferable skills in the self-reflected handling and creation of history. A key factor in fostering historical thinking is the appropriation of learning tasks. This case study measures the complexity of learning tasks in Austrian history textbooks as one important aspect of their quality. It makes use of three different approaches to complexity to triangulate the notion: general task complexity (GTC), general linguistic complexity (GLC), and domain-specific task complexity (DTC). The question is which findings can be offered by the specific strengths and limitations of the different methodological approaches to give new insights into the study of task complexity in the domain of history education research. By pursuing multidisciplinary approaches in a triangulating way, the case study opens up new prospects for this field. Besides offering new insights on measuring the complexity of learning tasks, the study illustrates the need for further research in this field – not only related to the development of analytical frameworks, but also regarding the notion of complexity in the context of historical learning itself.

This special edition of HERJ (number 16.1) sprang from an international symposium in Salzburg, Austria on 11 and 12 May 2017, called Triangulation in History Education Research (H-Soz-Kult, 2019). It includes 12 articles on mixed-methods research and triangulation in history education research from seven different countries: Australia, Austria, Germany, the Netherlands, Portugal, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.

Auf welche Weise offenbart sich der Einfluss bildungsadministrativer Vorgaben und fachwissenschaftlicher Diskurse im Geschichtsschulbuch? Die vorliegende Studie geht dieser Frage anhand einer diachronen Längsschnittuntersuchung zum mittelalterlichen "Lehnswesen" in hessischen Geschichtsschulbüchern zwischen 1945 und 2015 auf den Grund. Nach der Entwicklung eines möglichst repräsentativen Untersuchungskorpus wird auf Basis der verschiedenen Lehrpläne und mediävistischen Grundlagen ein Fragenkatalog für die anschließende Schulbuchanalyse entwickelt auf dessen Basis Veränderungen in den Schulbuchdarstellungen offengelegt und exemplarisch konkretisiert werden. Abschließend setzt die Studie die verschiedenen Einflussfaktoren bei der Erstellung neuer und der Überarbeitung alter Geschichtsschulbücher miteinander in Bezug und bewertet diese hinsichtlich ihrer Bedeutung für Veränderungen in Schulbüchern., How do education policy guidelines manifest themselves in school history textbooks and to what extent is the influence of academic discourse discernible? This study explores such questions through a diachronic longitudinal examination of the how the medieval feudal system is depicted in Hessian school history textbooks published between 1945 and 2015. After assembling as representative a study sample as possible the researchers develop a list of questions, based on the different curricula and medievalist principles, to enable defined examples to be revealed of changes in textbook depictions. Finally the study re-examines and compares the diverse factors influencing the creation of new history textbooks and the revision of existing texts and evaluates what bearing such factors have on changes to textbooks.