Page 189 - Balancing between the present and the past

Study1: How can we measure elementary and secondary school students’ ability to contextualize historical agents’ actions?
To answer this question, we examined two instruments. One instrument was adapted from Hartmann and Hasselhorn (2008) and focused on the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany in the 1930s. Using the same format, we developed a second instrument that focused on 19th-century slavery. Both instruments were tested for validity and reliability among 1,270 Dutch upper elementary and secondary school students, ranging in age from 10 to 17 years. Principal component analysis (PCA) and Cronbach’s alpha coefficients showed that the Nazi Party instrument was the more valid and reliable instrument. Constructing a new instrument using the same format as the Nazi Party instrument proved to be a difficult task since we found low reliability scores for the slavery instrument. To explore how students of different ages and educational levels performed historical contextualization, we analyzed the data that we obtained from the Nazi Party instrument. The results indicated that upper elementary school students successfully performed some historical contextualization efforts starting at approximately the age of ten. However, older students achieved higher scores for historical contextualization than younger students. When examining differences between educational levels, we found that pre-university students achieved the highest historical contextualization scores compared to those of students in senior general secondary education and elementary education groups. The amount of prior topic knowledge might be an explanation for these differences since we found a correlation (.27) between students’ topic knowledge and their contextualization scores.
Study 2: How successfully can secondary school students contextualize historical agents’ 8 actions?
In this study, we assessed with the Nazi Party instrument a sample of 15- and 16-year- old secondary school students (n = 143) to determine their ability to contextualize the actions of people in the past. Subsequently, we used the thinking-aloud methodology to explore the reasoning of 36 students to uncover their contextualization process. The results of this study showed that only seven of the 143 students (4.9%) had a mean historical contextualization score < 2.50 out of a maximum 4.00 score. Most students (57.3%) achieved a mean score ≥ 3.00 and < 3.50 and 22.4% obtained mean scores ≥ 3.50. The verbal protocols of the 36 students were analyzed for the use of present- oriented perspectives, historical empathy, and historical context knowledge. These analyses indicated that five students did not realize that people in the past did not
General conclusions and discussion
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