Page 166 - Balancing between the present and the past

Chapter 7
Table 24. Teachers’ characteristics
Teacher
Gender
Age
Years’ work experience
Condition
Educational track
Class size
T1 Female
T2 Male
T3 Male
T4 Female
Total
T5 Female
T6 Male
T7 Male
Total
32 6 50 5 34 9 30 6
23 1 51 25 56 25
Experimental Experimental Experimental Experimental
Control Control Control
Senior general secondary education 26 Senior general secondary education 26 Pre-university education 20 Pre-university education 24
96
Pre-university education 23 Senior general secondary education 22 Pre-university education 28
73
In total, 169 secondary school students from
(senior general secondary education and
in the study, ranging in age from 14 to 16 years old. The mean students’ age in the experimental condition was 14.8 (SD = 0.56) years old compared to a mean age of 14.7 (SD = 0.53) years old for the control condition. The female and male distribution in the experimental condition was 48% and 52%, respectively. In the control condition, this distribution was 45% and 55%, respectively. Two students in the sample held non- Dutch nationalities while the other students held Dutch nationality.
7.4.3 The structure of the lesson unit
The three components of the historical contextualization framework were used to develop a 4-lesson unit focusing on Cold War events for secondary students aged 14 to 16 years old. This topic was chosen because it fitted the history teachers’ curricula the best at the time of the intervention. The lesson topics (The start of the Cold War and the fear of the atomic bomb, the American fear of communism, and the Hungarian Revolt) are topics implemented in the formal history curricula for the two highest educational tracks in the Netherlands (Board of Tests and Examinations, 2017). In previous research, we used a repetitive lesson structure for eight lessons (Huijgen, Van de Grift, et al., 2018). However, the students and teachers became demotivated because they had to do the same work for each lesson.
In this study, we therefore used only four lessons and used Merrill’s (2002) review study of instructional design theory to create a new and more motivating structure in the lesson unit. Five principles are elaborated by Merrill (2002): (1) problem-centered learning, (2) activation of existing knowledge, (3) demonstration of new knowledge, (4) application of new knowledge, and (5) integration of new knowledge. The first two
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the two highest Dutch educational tracks pre-university education) participated