Page 35 - Balancing between the present and the past

and Hasselhorn (2008) excluded one instruments’ item (ROA1) from their analysis
because factor analysis showed that it violated the two-dimensional structure of their conceptualization of HPT. We included this item in our instrument because our study
has been conducted in a larger and more heterogeneous student population and 2 therefore might fit in our conceptualization of HPT.
As a second step, to investigate the effect of topic choice on a student’s ability to perform HPT, we developed three other hypothetical scenarios and items about different historical topics, with the same item-rating format Hartmann and Hasselhorn (2008) used. The first scenario was about medieval witchery, the second scenario was about the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands from 1940 to 1945, and the last scenario focused on 19th century-slavery. Constructing the scenarios and items was a difficult challenge because every historical topic has its own historical context with different related historical phenomena. HPT was embedded in different ways into the scenarios and with different student tasks. In the medieval witchery scenario, students had to explain the burnings of witches; in the Nazi occupation scenario, students had to decide what Dutch policemen would have done when asked to sign a document of collaboration with the Nazis. In the slavery scenario, we triggered HPT in the context of a question to evaluate information from a historical source. All three newly developed scenarios and items intentionally were designed to give rise to students’ emotions and their present values and beliefs just as Hartmann and Hasselhorn’s (2008) instrument did, because we wanted to examine whether students could set aside their first emotional reaction, create a historical context, and explain people’s actions in the past.
To decide which additional instruments were the most suitable for use in our research and whether such instruments would be practically used by teachers in the classroom, we organized an expert panel composed of four history teacher educators from two universities (two with more than 4 years’ work experience; two with more than 14 years’ work experience), six secondary school history teachers (all six with more than 22 years’ work experience), and two elementary school teachers (both with more than 16 years’ work experience). The meeting took place in the context of a 1-day teacher-training program at the University of Groningen, and all teachers and teacher educators participated voluntarily.
All secondary school teachers and teacher educators were optimistic about the use of these instruments in classroom practice, not only for assessing the ability to
Measuring historical contextualization
33