In current school history curriculum in Taiwan, historical thinking is highly emphasized. Students are expected to understand how history is constructed instead of merely memorizing and accumulating historical knowledge. However, with the demands of developing students’ historical thinking, the content of history in curriculum is not reduced. After learning the same historical content repeatedly, will students have a better understanding of the change and development in time? Does the historical knowledge students acquire from schools help themselves connect the past, the present and the future? Understanding that this is an important and yet little explored field, this study aims to explore Taiwanese students’ ideas about the past, present and future, with the focus on how the past they have learned is related to their understandings of the present and the future. In the first year, the pilot study was implemented in two different senior high schools in order to test and refine the research instruments and to acquire a preliminary understanding of students’ ideas about the connection between the past, present and future. In the second year, the data analysis of the previous results was continued and students’ ideas about learning experience of Taiwanese history were also examined. The result suggested that students in this study believed that it was not effective by learning Taiwanese repeatedly. They claimed that it only increased more details of historical knowledge, but failed to expand the depth of historical knowledge and learning interests. This study contributed to our understandings about how students make use of historical knowledge to understand present and future. Furthermore, it also shed some lights about tudents’ historical learning about Taiwanese history, and could be built up for the revision of the future history school curriculum in Taiwan.
