Page 48 - Balancing between the present and the past
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                                Chapter 2
of different frames of reference, specific (prior) knowledge, and understanding of the historical context and chronology (e.g., De Keyser & Vandepitte, 1998; Van Boxtel & Van Drie, 2012). For example, if students have little prior knowledge about a topic, they might refer more to specific characteristics of the historical agent to perform HPT (Berti et al., 2009). These are difficult abilities to measure using only the instruments described in this study.
A more comprehensive measurement procedure might be necessary if we want to include the measurement of students’ underlying knowledge and understanding. Constructing items that take into account, different frames of knowledge might provide insight into which different frames of reference are used by students when performing HPT (e.g., De Keyser & Vandepitte, 1998). The addition of thinking- aloud methods could also facilitate improved insight into whether students apply specific knowledge of topics and whether they combine this with knowledge about the specific characteristics of the historical agent. Combining the instruments with related historical empathy tasks and historical content tests might also provide insight into the roles played by distinguished elements (viz., historical contextualization, historical empathy, and avoiding presentism) when students perform HPT.
Another limitation is that both instruments focused purposefully on topics that give strong rise to students’ emotions, such as anger and compassion, and these emotions may hinder efforts to better understand the past (Von Borries, 1994). It would be interesting to see how students perform HPT with respect to historical topics that do not explicitly give rise to emotions such as the invention of the steam engine. Furthermore, the items and the scenarios do not represent the whole historical context of the historical phenomena. The instruments had to be suitable for elementary school students; therefore, the items might consist of more simple functional explanations about the past (e.g., Bermúdez & Jaramillo, 2001). Constructing more items for each category or using different instruments focusing on the same historical topic might tackle this problem.
Further research should focus on the question of whether it is possible to construct a reliable and valid measurement of the ability to perform HPT, without the dependency of a specific historical topic and without being embedded in different tasks, such as historical empathy tasks in which students are asked to take the perspective of a fictional or genuine historical person or to examine the trustworthiness and
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