Page 57 - Balancing between the present and the past

and historical agents’ actions. To reconstruct a historical context, students can use
different frames of reference, including a chronological frame of reference, a spatial
frame of reference, or a social frame of reference. The chronological frame includes
knowledge about the time and the period as well as the sequence of significant
events and developments (e.g., Dawson, 2009; Wilschut, 2012). For example, when
attempting to understand why people in Germany in the 1930s voted for the Nazi
Party, it is important to know the sequence of the First World War, the economic crisis
of 1929, and the rise of Hitler. In contrast, the spatial frame focuses on knowledge 3 about geographical locations and scale (e.g., De Keyser & Vandepitte, 1998; Havekes
et al., 2012), such as knowledge of where Germany is located in Europe, what countries share boundaries with Germany, and what countries are near Germany. The social frame includes not only knowledge about human behavior and the social conditions of life but also knowledge about socio-economic, socio-cultural, and socio-political developments (e.g., Pontecorvo & Girardet, 1993; Shemilt, 2009; Van Boxtel & Van Drie, 2012), such as knowledge of the poor German economic circumstances and the anger Germans had regarding the Treaty of Versailles. Some studies (e.g., Berti, Baldin, & Toneatti, 2009) contended that if students do not possess sufficient knowledge to reconstruct a historical context, they may use historical empathy (by referring more to specific characteristics of the historical agent) to perform HPT.
3.2.2 Students’ ability to perform HPT
Are secondary school students cognitively capable of taking a historical perspective? Using short historical stories and classifying students’ answers to questions related to those stories, Hallam (1970) and Kennedy (1983) concluded that students under the age of 16 years lack historical reasoning competencies, such as HPT. Compared with adults, elementary and secondary school students do indeed experience greater difficulty taking another person’s perspective, particularly when that other person does not possess the same knowledge that they have (Bloom & German, 2000; Perner, 1991; Wellman, Cross, & Watson, 2001). Birch and Bloom (2007) discussed the curse of knowledge, which is a cognitive bias that makes it difficult for students who have more knowledge to think from the perspective of lesser-informed people. This inability hinders the successful implementation of HPT in history education, as students must be aware that much of the information and knowledge they possess was not available to people in the past.
Contextualizing historical agents’ actions
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