Now, before things get out of hand, I dont think it is, I love history. I dont even know if this is the correct subreddit to ask for help on the subject, bu hey, I thought I d try.
So, I am looking for journals/conference papers etc where the authors examine students' attitudes towards history (at least when taught with traditional teacher-centric methodologies and textbooks).
I only have one source so far and a reviewer kind of got prickly when I wrote in my paper that "k 12 students usually think of history as an austere and dry subject". I have like a million online articles by educators supporting just that, but I need at least one more peer reviewed publication to cite, cause the dude is probably a historian and took it really bad.
Context: I am a mathematician and do STEM education stuff, now building educational scenaria bridging STEM teaching with humanities (gamification of learning, inverted classroom etc-Ok imagine teaching a historical siege with kids also building robotic catapults) and the paper was on one of my experiments.
I totally understand if this question is out of the subreddits scope,please delete it if it is.
Your method is flawed. You are looking for proof that your hypothesis is correct instead of looking for truth regarding your subject. This is poor scholarship.
I am an educator with a master's degree in pedagogy. Students who see history as an "austere and dry subject" are students with a bad history teacher using out-dated teaching methods, and who also are unmotivated and don't like/feel alienated from formal education in general. They are probably the same students who hold similar opinions of all of their subjects, and so you are looking at a problem of motivation, not a problem with the subject of history itself. Many students love history, and your assumption that they don't is what is running you into trouble.
I'd be interested to know what "like a million online articles by educators supporting just that" entails and how many of those articles are peer reviewed research vs. opinion peices by teachers bitching about having to inspire the uninspired.
You'll find more accurate and informative sources to inform your search for enlightenment if you search for something to the effect of "increase motivation" in educational psychology and pedagogical studies. Any beginners book of educational psychology should hold some answers. You might also be interested in James Gordon Greeno's "On Claims that Answer the Wrong Question," published in Educational Researcher 26:5-17 DOI: 10.3102/0013189X026001005.
And I wouldn't teach a lesson about a seige and then have kids build a modern version of a catapult. It wouldn't teach them anything about history or historical technologies, it would take weeks, and in my state I would have to provide all of the materials out of my own pocket. It's one of those "fun" sounding "educational activities" that doesn't accomplish any actual educational goals. Furthermore, if you think this prospective lesson has anything to do with gamification or a flipped classroom, you need to research those terms. "Gamification" does not mean "playing games" and "flipped classroom" does not mean flipping materials across the room with a catapult made of legos.