Page 77 - Balancing between the present and the past
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                                (Does not fit his situation at all) to receive the maximum score. However, these students
reasoned that Hannes could not have known the outcome of the Second World War,
thus displaying a non-present-oriented perspective, and therefore ticked the last
box (Fits his situation very well), which yielded a score of 1. The same thing occurred
when students answered the sixth item. Rewriting these two items might reduce the
potential for misunderstanding, and more detailed instruction on the terminology
of the scoring boxes (such as the inclusion of a test item) before beginning the
instrument might resolve this problem. Second, we observed in the data protocols 3 that students answered the instruments’ items after closely reading and investigating
Contextualizing historical agents’ actions
 the source. Testing students’ reading comprehension levels could better identify the impact student reading ability has on students’ scores on the HPT instrument.
Furthermore, the ROA items on the instrument require examination. Originally, Hartmann and Hasselhorn (2008) conceptualized the ROA items as an intermediate stage between presentism and historical contextualization. Students could refer to roles or institutions that they know from their own lives (e.g., the role of a father or businessman). However, we did not find evidence that the ROA items represented an intermediate stage between presentism and historical contextualization. To further investigate the relationships between the cognitive and affective elements of historical empathy and the instrument’s ROA items, the ROA items could be divided into two categories, specifically, items that might trigger more affective processes of historical empathy (e.g., “If my own father would be fired, I could vote for the Nazi Party in the 1930s.”) and items that might trigger more cognitive processes (e.g., “Hannes belongs to a wealthy family. Therefore, he could vote for the Nazi Party.”).
Though we did not find a strong relationship between generic task approaches (e.g., evaluating decisions, expressing doubt) and domain-specific strategies, such as performing HPT, quasi-experimental studies that focus on promoting HPT and include generic task approaches could provide valuable insights for the teaching and learning of history. Furthermore, more quasi-experimental research involving the spatial context and the position of a historical agent in society is needed as only a few students in our study displayed this in their reasoning. Thus, it would be interesting to see whether teacher instruction focused explicitly on the spatial context and the historical agents’ position results in better HPT performance.
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