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The appropriateness of history in primary schools is yet again questioned in the Rose Review (The Times, 8 December 2008). This age-old debate was in part silenced with the subject's inclusion for all pupils in the National Curriculum, but is raging once more. The Office for Standards in Education (OfSTED) has cautioned that history is becoming endangered in all key stages and the President of the Historical Association has warned that its dilution in a skills-led curriculum is a cause for social, as well as educational alarm. It is therefore opportune to investigate the rationale for its teaching, not in a new analysis of the well-trodden twentieth-century curriculum, but in the largely neglected Victorian period, using the evidence of Her Majesty's Inspector (HMI) reports. The paper is divided into two sections, the first analysing the Victorian rationale for studying the subject in elementary schools and the second investigating the numbers of children actually studying history and the extent of this study. It shows the avid debates on its appropriateness, particularly for the poor, although the vociferous concerns of many HMI finally led to it being brought into the mainstream classroom by the beginning of the twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Touchscreen Human-Machine Interfaces (HMIs) are a well-established and popular choice to provide the primary control interface between driver and vehicle, yet inherently demand some visual attention. Employing a secondary device with the touchscreen may reduce the demand but there is some debate about which device is most suitable, with current manufacturers favouring different solutions and applying these internationally. We present an empirical driving simulator study, conducted in the UK and China, in which 48 participants undertook typical in-vehicle tasks utilising either a touchscreen, rotary-controller, steering-wheel-controls or touchpad. In both the UK and China, the touchscreen was the most preferred/least demanding to use, and the touchpad least preferred/most demanding, whereas the rotary-controller was generally favoured by UK drivers and steering-wheel-controls were more popular in China. Chinese drivers were more excited by the novelty of the technology, and spent more time attending to the devices while driving, leading to an increase in off-road glance time and a corresponding detriment to vehicle control. Even so, Chinese drivers rated devices as easier-to-use while driving, and felt that they interfered less with their driving performance, compared to their UK counterparts. Results suggest that the most effective solution (to maximise performance/acceptance, while minimising visual demand) is to maintain the touchscreen as the primary control interface (e.g. for top-level tasks), and supplement this with a secondary device that is only enabled for certain actions; moreover, different devices may be employed in different cultural markets. Further work is required to explore these recommendations in greater depth (e.g. during extended or real-world testing), and to validate the findings and approach in other cultural contexts., (Copyright © 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)