Page 30 - Balancing between the present and the past
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                                Chapter 2
to make sense of how students learn history and how they improve in it. Increasing numbers of research studies, projects, conferences, and books concentrate on the assessment of history education to gain insight into its benefits and problems (e.g., Breakstone, Smith, & Wineburg, 2013; Davies, 2011; Harris & Foreman-Peck, 2004; Martin, Maldonado, Schneider, & Smith, 2011; Seixas & Colyer, 2012; SERVE, 2006).
Our study should be placed in this context, and we took up the key challenge of constructing a reliable and valid measure instrument that could assess historical reasoning competencies within a large and heterogeneous student population and which was also time- and cost-effective. We focused on HPT because this student ability is crucial to learning history. Failing to perform HPT leads to important misunderstanding about the past (Barton & Levstik, 2004; Davis, 2001; Husbands, 1996; Lee & Ashby, 2001; Leinhardt, Beck, & Stainton, 1994; Lévesque, 2008; Seixas & Morton, 2013; Van Boxtel & Van Drie, 2012; Wineburg, 2001; Wineburg & Fournier, 1994; Yeager & Foster, 2001). Scholars also have argued that HPT can contribute to citizenship competencies because recognizing other people’s views is necessary in a multicultural democracy (e.g., Barton & Levstik, 2004; Den Heyer, 2003).
Hartmann and Hasselhorn (2008) designed a measurement instrument that offers positive indicators for assessing students’ ability of performing HPT. However, they tested their instrument only among a homogenous group of 170 tenth-grade German students (16 years old) and focused on only one historical topic. Our study focuses on testing the instrument format among students in a larger and more heterogeneous student population and with two different historical topics to map possible differences between students. In this study, we first present the theoretical framework, starting with the conceptualization of HPT and how it relates to historical reasoning. Subsequently, we look at what is already known about students’ ability to perform HPT and focus on the opportunities and difficulties that exist for measuring HPT. Then, our research questions, method, results, conclusions, and discussion will be presented.
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