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Choose Carefully

Multiple Choice History Exams and the Reification of Collective Memory

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The New Politics of the Textbook

Part of the book series: Constructing Knowledge ((CKCS,volume 2))

Abstract

The chapters in this book build on a substantial literature that looks critically at the content and uses of school textbooks. As other authors in the book have argued, textbooks perform a conservative role in K-12 education as sites of curricular authority and as arbiters of truth. In this sense, textbooks are what Michel Foucault (1995/1977, 1980) might call a technology whose function is to transfer knowledge, ideas, and values from one generation to another. In this chapter, I argue that examinations are also a technology for propagating a set of ideas, and I use multiple-choice history exams to illustrate my point.

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Reich, G.A. (2012). Choose Carefully. In: Hickman, H., Porfilio, B.J. (eds) The New Politics of the Textbook. Constructing Knowledge, vol 2. SensePublishers, Rotterdam. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-6091-930-5_18

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