Page 194 - Balancing between the present and the past

Chapter 8
limitation is that the first two studies focused on contextualizing historical agents’ actions. In these two studies, we did not focus on other important historical reasoning competencies, such as the use of historical contextualization to interpret historical sources or to determine continuity and change in history. Future research should therefore develop instruments that test students’ ability to use historical contextualization to perform these other historical reasoning competencies.
A second important limitation focuses on the instruments developed and used in this thesis. The Nazi Party instrument (used in the first two studies) showed positive indicators for reliability and validity. However, the instruments’ scenario is fictional, focuses on one historical topic, and contains only a textual story. Developing instruments using different historical topics and sources is necessary to provide more insights into students’ ability to perform historical contextualization when explaining historical events or agents’ actions. Moreover, future research should examine how the internal consistency of the instrument can be increased since this was on the lower side of what is considered acceptable. The function of the role of the historical agent (ROA) items also remains unclear. As suggested in the second study, when researchers or teachers want to include ROA items in an instrument, they can split these items into two categories: (1) items that might trigger more affective processes of historical empathy (i.e., using recognizable or universal emotions) and (2) items that might trigger more cognitive processes (i.e., considering the role of the historical agent) of historical empathy. In the fifth study, two historical contextualization tasks were used, both containing multiple-choice items. The internal consistencies of both instruments were on the lower side of what is considered acceptable. Further, multiple-choice questions do not display students’ reasoning as well as open-ended questions. In the sixth study, a historical contextualization test was therefore used based on the instruments tested in the first study and on the History Assessments of Thinking (HATs) of the Stanford History Education Group. However, this six-item test needs more validation by, for example, using expert panels and conducting thinking- aloud protocols with students of different ages, educational levels, and backgrounds.
The Framework for Analyzing the Teaching of Historical Contextualization (FAT-HC), which was developed in the third study and used in the fourth study, needs more examination to increase the reliability because nearly 35% of the variance (residual) could not be explained by teacher, observer, or lesson variance. Moreover, the number of items in the instrument (40 items) should be decreased because observers indicated
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