Page 65 - Balancing between the present and the past

Table 7. Categories, subcategories, and examples of students’ reasoning
Displaying presentism
Historical empathy
Reconstructing a historical context
Task approaches
Viewing people in the past as stupid
Assuming that people in the past had the same knowledge that we have today
Making affective connections
Involving the position of the historical agent in the society
Using chronological knowledge Using spatial knowledge
Using socio-economic knowledge Using socio-political knowledge
Using socio-cultural knowledge
Referring to text Specification of ignorance
Hannes is just acting stupid when he votes for Hitler.
Hannes would definitely not vote for Hitler, because his Party was responsible for the Second World War.
If my own father was going to be broke, I would also help him.
Hannes was a member of the bourgeoisie. 3 The Second World War has not begun.
The location of the scenario is Germany. There were poor economic circumstances.
The Germans did not have much experience with democracy.
There was a lot of anger among many Germans regarding the Treaty of Versailles.
The text stated..., in the text...
I do not know if the Germans had much experience with democracy / When did the Second World War begin?
Contextualizing historical agents’ actions
Category
Subcategory
Example
Using Tukey’s honestly significant difference (HSD) post hoc test, we found no significant differences between the average HPT performances of female and male students. Next, we calculated a mean HPT score for students from the same school and used Tukey’s HSD post hoc test to determine whether some schools outperformed other schools or scored exceptionally low compared to other schools. The test displayed no significant differences among schools. To examine the possible correlation between students’ mean prior knowledge scores and their mean HPT scores, we calculated a Pearson correlation coefficient and found a small but statistically significant correlation of .19 at the .05 level. In contrast to Hartmann and Hasselhorn (2008), we did not find a significant correlation between students’ mean HPT scores and their history grades. Table 9 breaks down the sample by student HPT ability. A mean HPT score ≥ 3.50 was achieved by 32 students (22.4%), which indicated excellent ability to perform HPT, while only seven students (4.9%) obtained a mean HPT score < 2.50, which indicated inadequate ability to perform HPT. Most students (n = 82, 57.3%) achieved mean HPT scores ≥ 3.00 < 3.50, which indicated good ability to perform HPT.
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