Page 176 - Balancing between the present and the past

Chapter 7
7.5 Results
7.5.1 Presentism and contextualization in students’ answers
Based on the coding of the students’ answers, Table 27 presents the descriptive statistics (mean scores) of the presence of presentism and contextualization in the students’ answers on the pre- and post-test in both conditions. The maximum score for each category is 6.00 when students use historical context knowledge or display presentism in all six questions. The effect sizes (Cohen’s d) are for the dependent sample t-tests. The effect sizes indicate the standardized difference between the two means and displays this difference in standard deviation units. In both conditions, the students displayed less presentism when the intervention ended, but the students in the experimental condition used far less presentism in the post-test compared to the students in the control condition. The students in the experimental condition also used more contextualization in the post- test than in the pre-test, while students in the control condition showed slightly less use of contextualization in the post-test compared to the pre-test.
Table 27. Descriptive statistics of the presence of presentism and contextualization in the students’ answers (maximum score = 6.00)
Experimental 96 1.26 (1.04) .82 (0.87) 0.37 .001 3.96 (1.42) 4.35 (1.31) 0.26 .013 Control 73 1.52 (0.85) 1.41 (0.78) 0.14 .230 3.92 (1.24) 3.67 (1.29) 0.12 .066
A repeated measurement ANOVA was performed to test whether the students in the experimental condition displayed a significantly greater decline in the use of presentism than students in the control condition after the intervention ended. This repeated measurement analysis indicates that the decline of the use of presentism is significantly higher in the experimental condition than in the control condition (F(1, 167) = 4.17, p = .04, = .02, which is considered a small effect; Cohen, 1988). This means that the intervention contributed significantly to the decline in presentism in the post-test answers.
Another repeated measurement ANOVA was conducted to examine whether the intervention contributed significantly to the increased difference between the
174
Sig. (p)
Cohen’s d Contextualization
post-test (SD)
Contextualization pre-test (SD)
Sig. (p)
Cohen’s d Presentism
post-test (SD)
Presentism pre-test (SD)
n
Condition