Page 190 - Balancing between the present and the past

Chapter 8
have the same knowledge as we have today. One student viewed the protagonist in the task as naïve. The other students were aware of the consequences of their present- oriented perspective when performing the historical contextualization task. Students used affective forms of historical empathy (e.g., love for your parents) to solve the task but they did not consider explicitly the role of the historical agent in society. Moreover, the students used chronological knowledge and knowledge of socio-economic, socio- political, and socio-cultural circumstances. Spatial knowledge (e.g., the geographical size of the Weimar Republic and the German Empire) was not explicitly considered. Students who obtained mean scores ≥ 3.00 seemed to use more historical context knowledge in their reasoning than students with mean scores < 3.00. These findings and the small correlation (.19) between students’ topic knowledge and their contextualization scores indicate that historical content knowledge is necessary to successfully perform historical contextualization.
8.1.2 Teachers’ instructions with regard to contextualization
To examine how history teachers might promote historical contextualization, an observation instrument was developed and tested in the third study (Chapter 4). This instrument was used in the fourth study (Chapter 5) to explore how eight history teachers promoted historical contextualization in their classrooms.
Study 3: What instrument can be used to observe how history teachers promote historical contextualization in classrooms?
This study presented the development of the Framework for Analyzing the Teaching of Historical Contextualization (FAT-HC). This is a high-inference observation instrument that focuses on history teachers’ competency in promoting historical contextualization in classrooms. The instrument can be used to provide discipline- specific feedback to teachers. Using expert panels, positive indicators of the instrument’s content validity were found. Furthermore, generalizability theory analysis (e.g., Brennan, 2001; Hill, Charalambous, & Kraft, 2012) provided indicators that the instrument is one-dimensional when used to evaluate how history teachers promote historical contextualization. Generalizability theory analysis also showed that a large proportion of the instrument’s variance is explained by the differences between the observed teachers and a small proportion of the variance is explained by the differences in lessons and observers, which are conclusions that provide positive indicators for the instrument’s reliability. To construct a reliable scoring design, a decision study (D-study) was conducted. A scoring design with one observer
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