Page 47 - Balancing between the present and the past

of a source for making statements about the past, the observed differences might
have stemmed from the specific instructions provided for the slavery instrument. For
this instrument, students had to approach the story about how the enslaved people
were treated as historical source. In addition to performing HPT, students also had 2 to execute other historical thinking and reasoning competencies related to the use
of historical evidence (e.g., assessing the reliability of the source) when completing the slavery instrument successfully. This dimension is missing from the Nazi Party instrument.
The differences also might be explained by the students’ having less prior knowledge of slavery. Students scored lower on the slavery prior knowledge questions compared with the topic knowledge questions related to the Nazi Party. Van Boxtel and Van Drie (2012) concluded that knowledge of key historical concepts and dates plays an important role in a student’s ability to contextualize a historical source. Thinking- aloud methods could be a valuable addition for gaining insight about whether students use knowledge (and what knowledge they do use) when responding to the slavery items and whether they notice differences in how the items are constructed.
Although we found a significant correlation between students’ scores between the Nazi Party instrument and the slavery instrument, the results show that the slavery instrument did not meet our reliability and validity criteria. The secondary and elementary school teachers who were consulted were encouraging about the use of these instruments in classroom practice as both an assessment format and as a training exercise to stimulate HPT. Still, we do not exactly know if it is possible to test the ability to perform HPT in a reliable and valid way using items reflecting a present- oriented perspective, the role of the historical agent, and historical contextualization in the context of different historical topics. Our results illustrate the difficulties that are encountered when trying to construct a new instrument with this item-rating format using the same types of items used in the Nazi Party instrument.
We must take into account the limitations of our study. Our instruments focus on a student’s ability to consider the historical agents’ personal situations (i.e., the role of the historical agent) and the broader historical context (i.e., the present-oriented perspective and historical contextualization). This is a narrow view of HPT because scholars also refer to students’ awareness of the differences between past and present (e.g., Seixas & Peck, 2004), the sense of a period (Dawson, 2009), and the application
Measuring historical contextualization
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