Page 139 - Balancing between the present and the past

A total of 101 secondary school students (44 male, 57 female) participated in the experimental condition. The mean students’ age in this condition was 15.9 years and ranged from 15 to 18 years. The control condition yielded a total of 30 students (14 male, 16 female). The mean students’ age in the control condition was 15.9 years, ranging from 15 to 19 years. All participating students were senior general secondary educational students (the second-highest secondary educational track in the Netherlands) and did not have extensive prior knowledge of the historical topic of the lesson unit. The historical topic for the experimental and control condition was the 17th and 18th century because this topic fits with the teachers’ curriculum during the period in which we wanted to implement the intervention.
6.4.3 Historical contextualization instrument
To answer our research question, we developed and used a historical contextualization
test. In two meetings with four experienced history teachers (all four teachers had
more than 15 years of working experience each as history teachers), we constructed
30 items to test the students’ ability to perform historical contextualization. All items
consisted of a historical written source or image and an accompanying choice of two
answers: one answer presented a present-oriented perspective, and the other offered 6 a contextualized perspective on the historical source. For example, the students were
provided with a source describing the arranged and forced marriage of an 11-year- old girl in the late Middle Ages. The students had to choose the statement that fit the source best: a present-oriented answer (i.e., an 11-year-old should not be forced to marry) or a contextualized answer (i.e., these marriages were based on profit for the families). The items in the test comprised historical topics from the ancient to the modern period. These 30 items were piloted among 158 secondary students from three different schools, with a mean age of 15.1 years old. The pilot results displayed a Cronbach’s alpha (α) of .69.
Based on this test, the authors of this study constructed another eight items, yielding a total of 38 items. Next, we randomly assigned 19 items to the pre-test and 19 items to the post-test to reduce the carryover effect, i.e., the effect where students remember their answers from the pre-test and benefit from this retained information in the post-test (Bose & Dey, 2009). When analyzing the instruments’ reliability, we found five items in the pre-test and five items in the post-test that threatened the internal consistency of the instruments (α < .60). We therefore chose to delete these items. This resulted in a pre-test of 14 items (α = .70) and a post-test of 14 items (α = .68). There was a significant correlation between the pre-test and post-test (r = .49, p < .01).
A historical contextualization pedagogy
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