Page 58 - Balancing between the present and the past

Chapter 3
However, studies on students’ ability to perform HPT have shown that even upper elementary school students are capable of some form of HPT and can overcome tendencies of presentism (e.g., Barton, 1997; Davis et al., 2001; Foster & Yeager, 1999; VanSledright, 2002). In their Concepts of History and Teacher Approaches 7 to 14 project, Lee, Dickinson, and Ashby (1997) examined how students between the ages of 7–14 understand the nature and status of different historical claims. They found that some students between the ages of 11–14 were beginning to distinguish between what they know and what the historical agent knew at that time. Berti et al. (2009) interviewed a total of 150 students aged 8–25 years about the concept of the ordeal during the Middle Ages and concluded that nearly every student understood that the ordeal involved the intervention of God and was related to religious beliefs that differ from the beliefs held in the present. Hartmann and Hasselhorn (2008) investigated how 170 German 10th graders (mean age of 16) performed on an HPT instrument. They found that approximately 90% of the participants in the study successfully performed HPT. Huijgen et al. (2014) used the same instrument to test the ability of 1,270 elementary and secondary students aged between 10–17 years to perform HPT. Their results showed that even upper elementary school students are capable of performing some elements of HPT, though older students performed HPT more successfully than younger students.
3.2.3 Task approaches and the ability to perform HPT
Research has indicated that not only domain-specific knowledge, understanding, and strategiesareimportantforsolvingproblems,butalsothatmoregenerictaskapproaches are important, such as carefully analyzing a problem and evaluating decisions (e.g., Alexander, 2003; Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 2000). Only a few studies have focused on the use of task approaches in combination with contextualizing historical sources and historical agents’ actions. When investigating how students contextualize and date historical images and documents, Van Boxtel and Van Drie (2012) found that students who rushed to a conclusion or ignored information regarding the source more often failed to contextualize the source compared with students who approached the task systematically and used many clues provided by the source to generate alternative hypotheses.
Wineburg (1998) investigated how two historians created a historical context from a historical text noting that specification of ignorance could promote the ability to create an adequate historical context. This specification of ignorance can refer to expressing
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