Page 73 - Balancing between the present and the past

Other students referred to the “unfair” Treaty of Versailles, which resulted in anger
among Germans toward a democratic government, while still others mentioned that
Hannes was not used to living in a democracy with more freedom but poor economic circumstances. Therefore, he might be skeptical about this type of government.
The two students (Sophie and Bas) with the lowest mean HPT scores (2.11 and 1.89, respectively) demonstrated far less knowledge than did students with higher mean
HPT scores. Together with Mark (HPT score of 3.00), they were the only students
who combined just two different types of knowledge, specifically, socio-economic 3 and socio-political knowledge. They did not use chronological, spatial, or socio-
cultural knowledge. All other students combined at least three types of knowledge in their reasoning. For example, Sean and Stella combined chronological knowledge (e.g., Treaty of Versailles in 1919), socio-economic knowledge (e.g., poor economic circumstances), socio-political knowledge (e.g., foreign policy of the Nazis), and socio-cultural knowledge (e.g., the Germans’ anger regarding the Treaty of Versailles) when completing the assessment.
We also calculated a mean score for the use of different knowledge components by totaling the number of references to knowledge and then dividing this sum by five (the number of different knowledge components). For example, Bas made six references to knowledge and obtained a mean score of 1.20, whereas Tom made 38 references to knowledge and obtained a mean score of 7.60. When dividing our sample by the mean HPT score of 3.20 (based on the 143 students’ mean HPT score), students with a mean HPT score above 3.20 had an average of 4.26 references to knowledge in the protocols, whereas students with mean HPT scores less than 3.21 made, on average, just 2.34 references to knowledge.
3.5.2.4 Task approaches
Most of the students (n = 32) explicitly referenced the text about Hannes when working on the instrument, as displayed in Table 10. These students re-read parts of the text or referenced specific information when reasoning about individual items. Only four students read the text once, did not look at it again, and did not explicitly refer to it in their reasoning (see Table 10). Furthermore, most of the students (n = 25) displayed their specification of ignorance, i.e., they doubted their conclusions or indicated that they did not possess the knowledge. These students, for example, were not familiar with the specific political viewpoints of the Nazi Party and did not know how Hannes would react or respond to the instrument’s items. Consequently, they had to speculate:
Contextualizing historical agents’ actions
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