Page 182 - Balancing between the present and the past
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                                Chapter 7
different time periods. We noticed no extensive use of spatial, socio-political, socio- economic, or socio-cultural knowledge in the students’ answers. When students used these types of knowledge, it was often less concrete (e.g., “they did things differently back then”). A possible reason might be that the students did not receive topic knowledge about the test questions. Future research should therefore also include test questions related to the historical topic of the lesson unit to provide more insight into the role of historical context knowledge in historical contextualization processes.
Beyond the scope of this article, but nonetheless important, is the role of the history teacher. How did they experience teaching with the intervention? What did they learn? The teachers in our sample participated voluntarily, but how do other teachers react to using the framework in their history lessons? Future research should therefore include the teachers’ role, for example, by conducting teachers’ beliefs interviews (e.g., Luft & Roehrig, 2007) before and after the intervention. Future research should also focus on the historical topics of the test questions. Do questions about recent topics (e.g., women’s rights in the 1950s) trigger more present-oriented perspectives compared to more distant historical topics, such as the witch hunts in the 16th century? If this is the case, teachers should practice historical contextualization with distant historical topics and more recent historical topics.
Our study has several limitations. We used a quasi-experimental research design with non-probability sampling, while random assignment should be preferred (Cook & Payne, 2002). Moreover, the research was conducted with seven history teachers and 169 students. The seven history teachers also volunteered to participate in the study and they might be more motivated to improve their teaching compared to other history teachers. Follow-up studies using more teachers and students with different backgrounds and interventions focusing on different historical topics are needed to confirm the findings and to further examine possible gains in the students’ ability to perform historical contextualization. Furthermore, only six items were used as a historical contextualization test, and despite the fact that the test format was derived from previous work, more items and information on the validity and reliability of these items are needed. The development of a parallel test could help overcome the carryover effect (Bose & Dey, 2009). The interesting Historical Thinking Competencies in History project of Trautwein et al. (2017), where items are developed that can measure historical reasoning competencies, might provide effective formats for the development of new test items.
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