Page 76 - Balancing between the present and the past
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                                Chapter 3
Based on the protocols, we also contend that students are skipping specific scaffolds that include the role of the historical agent when working on HPT tasks, as few students explicitly considered the role of the historical agent (e.g., Hannes’ wealthy family influenced his preference for conservative political parties). Teachers who focus their instruction on teaching students to combine affective connections while also considering the role of the historical agent and the broader historical context might find that their students’ performance on HPT tasks improves rather significantly.
Consistent with a relevant point raised by Berti et al. (2009), we found evidence that students used the affective element of historical empathy when they did not succeed in reconstructing the historical context. Some students explicitly noted that they did not know the specific historical circumstances but could understand Hannes’ decision to vote for the Nazi Party because they, too, would not want to be unemployed. Because we observed this in the reasoning of only a few students, historical empathy as a fallback rationale and the interaction between affective and cognitive processes of historical empathy when performing HPT require further research.
Future research could also focus on whether affective connections are more difficult to make when the historical topics or issues are more distant, such as dating back to ancient Rome or the Middle Ages. Again, further research is needed to examine the extent to which students can perform HPT by evaluating current beliefs and values of different parts of the world, as we found one student in our study who applied this strategy.
Another finding of our study regards the instrument itself. While testing students about their knowledge of historical facts is rather easy, valid and reliable instruments that measure students’ historical reasoning competencies are scarce. Consequently, scholars have argued for new assessment formats (Ercikan & Seixas, 2015; Reich, 2009), and the development of the History Assessments of Thinking (HATs) is a good example (Breakstone, 2014; Breakstone, Smith, & Wineburg, 2013). That said, we used an instrument validated by Hartmann and Hasselhorn (2008) and Huijgen et al. (2014). However, some limitations with regard to the instrument’s validity and practical improvements must be noted. First, students may have misread or misunderstood two of the instruments’ items. We noted in the protocols that some students explicitly struggled with answering the instruments’ first and sixth items. For example, when working on the first item, students had to check the first box
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