Page 49 - Balancing between the present and the past

usefulness of a historical account. More research is also needed to investigate how
students perform when the central historical agent of the instrument is, for example,
a child or a politician. Students might identity themselves more with other children
or heroic figures than politicians, and this might affect their ability to perform HPT 2 (Brophy & VanSledright, 1997).
Additionally, the differences between taking the historical perspective of a group vs. taking the perspective of an individual should be further elaborated, following an interesting question raised by Berti et al. (2009). Furthermore, we only used one type of source: a textual story and its accompanying items. Textual sources play a very important role in history education, but so do visual sources. Further examination needs to be made of the differences that exist in HPT performance when the source is non-textual. Finally, but not less important, further research should focus on the role of the teacher. What types of instruction do teachers use to stimulate HPT in elementary and secondary education? Can the role of the historical agent be used as a scaffold for stimulating HPT? Such research could provide more insight into how to stimulate the important ability to perform HPT.
Measuring historical contextualization
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