| Recent educational reforms tend to focus on reading and math, possibly to the detriment of history education. As university students enroll in global family perspective courses, their lack of historical knowledge may cause barriers to learning for students and difficulties for professors who reference global events that have affected the course of global families and human development. This study examines students' self-reported historical knowledge and cultural competence and also explores how professors, if necessary, compensate for the lack of historical knowledge when teaching global family science and human development.;For this study, self-reported measures of historical literacy and cultural competency were collected from 123 students at the University of Colorado Denver using a quantitative questionnaire. Three professors who teach global family courses were interviewed using a qualitative protocol. The quantitative data were analyzed using SPSS to determine scales for cultural competence and historical knowledge while the qualitative data were evaluated using various thematic analysis techniques. Results show that historical literacy plays a small but statistically significant role in cultural competence and suggestions are made for future research and curriculum direction. |
