Page 37 - Balancing between the present and the past

for their levels of comprehension difficulty. All teachers involved in the expert panel
had more than 15 years’ work experience. The experts noted concerns about a few
substantive concepts in the hypothetical scenarios that were found to be too difficult,
especially for children in upper elementary schools, such as conservative, policy of 2 appeasement, and the name of the German political party DVNP.
The results of the qualitative pilot study and the expert panel meeting showed that both instruments needed minor revisions. We replaced difficult concepts with more specific terms or else removed them without affecting the interpretive framework of the hypothetical scenarios. In a second session with different upper elementary (n=4) and secondary (n=5) school students, we noticed that there was no more comprehension difficulty.
2.4.2 Sample and procedure
The study was conducted on 1,383 students in elementary (n=178) and secondary (n=1,205) schools—specifically, four elementary and 18 secondary schools in the northern part of the Netherlands. Missing data led us to exclude 113 cases, leaving 1,270 cases for further analysis. In the Dutch educational system, students begin their elementary education around the age of four and continue in elementary education for 8 years. In the last 2 years of their elementary education, students are advised about their further (secondary) education, including pre-vocational secondary education (4 years), senior general secondary education (5 years), or pre-university education (6 years). We included students undertaking elementary education, senior general secondary education, and pre-university education, as described in Table 1. Pre-vocational secondary education was not included in the research sample because of the different history curriculum of this type of education in which the ability to perform HPT played a far less substantial role compared to senior general secondary education and pre-university education.
Measuring historical contextualization
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