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 After learning the same historical content repeatedly, will students have a better understanding of the change and development in time?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. The research was carried out through a written task to investigate the ideas of a sample of 16-year-old students from two senior high schools in Taiwan. The results showed that more than half of the students could employ their knowledge of the past to make sense of the present. However, the majority of the students were not able to use their historical knowledge to infer future possibilities, including the ones who demonstrated understanding of the connection between the past and the present.
