Page 180 - Balancing between the present and the past

Chapter 7
The use of chronological knowledge was also more implicitly applied after the intervention ended. For example, Kathy displayed a present-oriented perspective (i.e., knowledge that was not yet available for people living in 1930) when she answered the third pre-test question about Hannes, who is inclined not to vote for the Nazi Party: “I chose statement I because nobody can justify what the Nazi Party has done to the world. I did not choose statement II because I do not think that Hannes would view Hitler as a strong leader.” However, Kathy considered in her post-test answer that Hannes was living in 1930 and did not yet know the outcome of the Nazi Party’s rise to power:
I chose statement II because Hannes wants to keep his job and does not want the company to go bankrupt. I did not choose statement I because Hannes did not know then what the Nazi Party would do to the world. He is focused on helping out in his father’s business.
In the control condition, no such increase was noticeable in the use of chronological knowledge. For example, whereas students in the experimental condition explicitly used chronological knowledge to answer Question 5 (e.g., recognizing that in the 1950s different laws, values, and beliefs applied), the students in the control condition used chronological indicators less often in their answers. The guiding questions focusing on reconstructing the chronological context (see Appendix G) might therefore teach students that historical events occurred in a different chronological context (compared to their contemporary context) and should therefore be examined in that particular context.
7.6 Conclusions and discussion
The aim of this study was to examine the effects of a lesson unit based on a three- stage historical contextualization framework on 14- to 16-year-old students’ ability to perform historical contextualization. Repeated measures analyses of variance showed that students in the experimental condition displayed significantly less presentism and used more historical context knowledge in their answers compared to students in the control condition after the intervention ended. Further analysis of the students’ answers indicated how students might have improved their historical contextualization skills during the intervention.
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