Page 74 - Balancing between the present and the past

Chapter 3
Lauren: He will not vote for the NSDAP. Their ideas are easy to see through. It is clear that this party wants a war, but I do not know if Hannes could see this. Interviewer: Why not?
Lauren: I do not know the ideas of the NSDAP. Was it obvious that Hitler wanted to start a war? I do not know this. (Lauren, reasoning about Item 3)
Three students, Kim, Rachel, and Anna, explicitly stated in their reasoning that they could not identify the answer because the source did not provide the specific information. One student, Tom, explicitly stated how he was going to approach the task without any encouragement from the interviewer:
First, I always examine the assignment before looking at the source. What do I have to do? I see a fill-in assignment with statements that I have to score. Next, I am going to look at the source. Okay, we have a source about Germany in the 1930s. (Tom, before beginning the assessment)
3.6 Conclusions and discussion
In this mixed-method study, we tested 143 pre-university students’ abilities to perform HPT as evidenced by their performance on an HPT instrument developed by Hartmann and Hasselhorn (2008), and we explored the underlying contextualization processes of 36 students. In the late 1990s, Angvik and Von Borries (1997) conducted a cross-national survey that aimed to examine 15- to 16-year-old students’ views on history education in Europe. One of the questions asked that students place themselves in the position of a young man or woman living in the 15th century who was being forced into marriage. The students were asked what they would do in such a circumstance if they had lived during that time period. Most students participating in the study found it difficult to reconstruct, accept, and acknowledge the concept of a forced marriage, and thus, they often expressed a present-oriented perspective. Nonetheless, only seven of the 143 students (4.9%) participating in our study had a mean HPT score < 2.50 out of a maximum 4.00 score, indicating inadequate ability to perform HPT. Most students (n = 82, 57.3%) achieved a mean HPT score ≥ 3.00 < 3.50, indicating good ability to perform HPT. This finding is consistent with Hartmann and Hasselhorn (2008), who also examined 15- to 16-year-old pre-university students’ abilities to perform HPT.
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