Page 169 - Balancing between the present and the past

street name change happened. To reconstruct the historical context of the Hungarian Revolution, the students had to use the guidelines from Appendix G. At the end of the fourth lesson, the students had to present their answer to the other students and received feedback from the teachers. When presenting their answers, the students also had to explain if the task helped them to explain and understand the street name change and if they changed their initial answer from the start of the third lesson.
Compared to the first two lessons in which the focus was more on demonstrating
historical contextualization (show me), the third and fourth lesson focused more
on the application of new knowledge (let me) and the integration of this knowledge
(watch me). In a review by Merrill (2002), it becomes clear that learning is encouraged
more when students are required to use their new skills to solve problems. These
problems should be real-world tasks instead of providing, for example, multiple-
choice questions. We therefore developed an assignment for the third and fourth
lessons to examine the Amsterdam street name change, where students have to apply
their skills in historical contextualization to complete this assignment successfully.
Moreover, in contrast to the first two lessons (where students received more support),
the final two lessons involved less student guidance because the students (on
their own) had to reconstruct the historical context of the Hungarian Revolt. This
scaffolding is considered an effective way to apply new forms of knowledge (Merrill,
2002). Moreover, in effective instruction, there must be an opportunity for students to demonstrate their newly acquired skill of historical contextualization. Therefore, at 7 the end of the fourth lesson, the students had the opportunity to demonstrate, reflect
on, defend, and share what they had learned over the past four lessons (Merrill, 2002).
7.4.5 The control condition
Table 25 provides an overview of the lesson activities in the experimental and control condition. The lessons in the control condition comprised the same historical topics and contained different lesson activities, but the students did not receive explicit instruction in historical contextualization. In each of the control lessons, the students’ prior knowledge was activated, historical phenomena were explained by the teacher, and the students completed assignments that were also discussed in a classroom discussion. Each lesson ended with a review of the most important historical phenomena of that particular lesson. The students’ assignments (which students had to complete during the control lessons) were developed by the authors to prevent deviations between the different control classrooms. The assignments always related
A historical contextualization framework
167