Page 36 - Balancing between the present and the past

Chapter 2
perform HPT but also as a practice and training instrument for their students. The secondary school teachers noted that history textbooks do not provide these types of assessment formats but focus more on assessing factual knowledge. The teachers also noted that using these instruments also supports other historical thinking and reasoning competencies, such as a critical evaluation of historical sources or providing solid argumentation. Furthermore, the secondary school teachers were optimistic about the use of the instruments as starting point for a whole-classroom discussion about, for example, the rise of Hitler in Nazi Germany.
The elementary school teachers were more restrained because they did not explicitly see the relevance of the instruments regarding the government’s goals for elementary history education. However, they were positive about the “empathy” aspect of the instruments and expected that such assignments would help students developing a better understanding of decisions made by a historical agent. The experts concluded that the topics of the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands and medieval witchcraft needed too detailed historical content knowledge, which would result in comprehension difficulty for upper elementary and young secondary school students. Therefore, we excluded these two scenarios and selected the slavery-related instrument as the second instrument.
The third and final step was shaping the two final instruments (see Appendix A for the Nazi Party instrument and Appendix B for the slavery instrument) in a manner that would make them suitable for both upper elementary and secondary school students. Therefore, we first conducted a qualitative pilot study among upper elementary (n = 6) and secondary school students (n = 9) to test the comprehension difficulty of the two instruments’ hypothetical scenarios. Specifically, while students performed the assignment and thought aloud, their answers were transcribed and analyzed to examine comprehension difficulty. We also asked the students to highlight difficult words in the scenarios and the accompanying items. The analysis of the pilot study showed that some abstract concepts in the hypothetical scenarios and question items were too difficult for upper elementary children. For example, the word master as a designation for a plantation owner in the slavery scenario caused confusion. In the hypothetical scenario of the Nazi Party, some upper elementary and secondary students also experienced difficulties with abstract concepts such as conservative. Second, we asked elementary school teachers (n = 4) and secondary school history teachers (n = 6) in an expert panel to review both hypothetical scenarios and items
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