Page 61 - Balancing between the present and the past

The three ROA items refer to the historical agents’ personal situation, such as the
agents’ family life. For example, the item “Because his father’s business is almost
bankrupt, he might vote for a party that protects small business owners” may
trigger possible affective connections between the students and the historical agent
through, for instance, recognizable emotions, such as protecting family members,
thus aligning with our conceptualized affective processes of historical empathy, or
trigger considerations of the position of Hannes’ family in society, such as wealth
and influence, thus aligning with our conceptualized cognitive processes of historical 3 empathy.
In contrast, the three CONT items display historical contextualization and form the opposite of the POP items. For example, the item “Hannes has little experience with democracy. He probably does not know the risks associated with the NSDAP and thus will probably vote for the NSDAP” should trigger the reconstruction of the socio- political context of Germany in the 1930s. In this scenario, students would have to know that Germany was an empire led by one strong leader for a long time and that the German people may want to return to this state, in which case, they would view Hitler as the new strong emperor. The CONT category aligns with our conceptualization of the third HPT component, namely, reconstructing the historical context.
Hartmann and Hasselhorn (2008) tested their instrument among 170 German 10th graders (mean age of 16). In a confirmatory factor analysis, they found that the POP and CONT items constituted one factor and that the two ROA items constituted the second factor. One item in this category (ROA1) displayed loadings above .40 on both factors and was excluded from further analysis. Huijgen et al. (2014) translated the instrument into Dutch and tested 1,270 Dutch upper elementary and secondary school students, ranging in age from 10–17 years. Their confirmatory factor analysis also indicated that the POP items and CONT items constituted one factor and that the three ROA items pertaining to the role of the historical agent constituted the second factor. In contrast to Hartmann and Hasselhorn’s (2008) finding, the item ROA1 did not violate the simple structure.
To assess the instrument’s face validity, Huijgen et al. (2014) asked 10 expert history teachers to sort the nine items on the instrument into the three categories. To determine the level of agreement among these experts, the authors calculated the Fleiss kappa, which at .64 indicated substantial agreement (Landis & Koch, 1977).
Contextualizing historical agents’ actions
59