Page 174 - Balancing between the present and the past

Chapter 7
7.4.6 The historical contextualization test
To test the effects of the pedagogy on the students’ ability to perform historical contextualization, we developed a historical contextualization test based on the History Assessments of Historical Thinking (HATs) developed by the Stanford History Education Group (e.g., Breakstone, Smith, & Wineburg, 2013) and instruments used in previous research on contextualization (Huijgen et al., 2014). These instruments offer more positive indicators for face and content validity compared to the construction of completely new instruments. Recently, we used a multiple-choice historical test (Huijgen, Van de Grift, et al., 2018), but this test did not provide the opportunity to examine the students’ answers since it only provided quantitative results.
The test used in this study comprised six open-ended questions regarding different historical topics (see Appendix H) and was used as a pre- and post-test. Based on the work of Hartmann and Hasselhorn (2008) and Huijgen et al. (2014), the first question included a scenario of a young man living in Germany in 1930 who must decide which political party to vote for. The students had to explain whether this young man might have voted for the Nazi Party. The second question asks students to note what else they should know to answer this question successfully. This question aims to provide insights into students’ consideration of what they do not know but should know to be able to answer the question. The third question uses a HAT format and displayed two statements about the German 1930s scenario. One statement displayed a present-oriented perspective and the other statement a contextualized perspective. The students had to choose and explain why they chose a particular statement. The fourth question was based on an instrument tested in a previous work (Huijgen et al., 2014) and focused on 19th-century slavery. The HAT format was again used to trigger a verdict about two statements. The fifth question concerns a young woman (Sophie) who reads in her history textbook that until the 1950s, women in the Netherlands lost their jobs when they married. Sophie reacts: “People were stupid in the past.” Based on the HAT format, the task for students is to explain if they do or do not agree with Sophie. The sixth and final question used the same lay-out and HAT format of the fifth question but focuses on 16th-century witch hunts.
7.4.7 Data analysis
To check the implementation fidelity of the intervention, all teachers were asked to review each lesson during the intervention and to provide information on whether all lesson activities were successfully completed and whether any irregularities occurred.
172