Page 196 - Balancing between the present and the past

Chapter 8
researchers and teacher educators help teachers to implement such instruments in their daily practice, and how can teachers help researchers and teacher educators to further improve these instruments?
Second, the observation instrument (FAT-HC) indicates that historical reasoning competencies can be observed in a practical manner. However, the instrument only focuses on historical contextualization. Developing instruments focusing on other historical reasoning competencies (such as using historical sources or determining causes and consequences) would provide more insights into how historical reasoning competencies are promoted in classrooms. The historical reasoning and thinking frameworks of Seixas and Morton (2013) and Van Drie and Van Boxtel (2008) and research on history teaching practices (e.g., Fogo, 2014) could provide a common core for constructing such domain-specific observation instruments. The PATH instrument of Van Hover, Hicks, and Cotton (2012) is a good example but needs further elaboration and more alternatives. The Teaching Historical Thinking and Reasoning instrument (Gestsdóttir, Van Boxtel, & Van Drie, submitted) is a promising effort.
In the third place, (quasi-)experimental studies are scarce within the field of history education research. More attention has recently been paid to conducting such studies (e.g., Reisman, 2012b; Stoel, Van Drie, & Van Boxtel, 2017) but this research method is still underexposed compared to the use of case studies and other qualitative methods. Intervention studies, where teachers and researchers work collaboratively to design pedagogies and practical tools, are highly needed to gain insight into what works within history education. These pedagogies should not be a “one solution for all strategy” but rather build upon each teacher’s individual characteristics and work context (Korthagen, 2017).
8.4 Scientific contribution
There is a need to develop and test new assessment formats to make sense of how students learn history and how they improve in it (Ercikan & Seixas, 2015; Smith, 2018; VanSledright, 2013). The first contribution of this thesis is therefore that several instruments to assess students’ ability to perform historical contextualization were constructed and tested. The first study showed, for example, that the Nazi Party instrument of Hartmann and Hasselhorn (2008) could be transferred and used in
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