Page 85 - Balancing between the present and the past

Lévesque, 2008; Van Drie & Van Boxtel, 2008; Wineburg, 2001). Therefore, historical
reasoning competencies, such as determining causality, investigating sources, asking
rich historical questions, and performing historical contextualization, have become
increasingly important in Western history education over the last two decades
(Erdmann & Hasberg, 2011; Seixas & Morton, 2013). Some scholars also stress the
importance of historical reasoning competencies for promoting students’ democratic
citizenship (e.g., Barton, 2012; Saye & Brush, 2004). To achieve historical reasoning competencies, students in history classes must be involved in engaging learning
tasks and activities (Gerwin & Visone, 2006; Grant & Gradwell, 2010; Levstik &
Tyson, 2008) and history lessons should extend beyond factual recall to achieve deep
subject understanding (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 2000; Darling-Hammond, 4 Wei, Andree, Richardson, & Orphanos, 2009). However, both novice and experienced
history teachers seem to struggle when they are asked to develop engaging learning tasks and teach students historical reasoning competencies (Monte-Sano, 2011; Van Hover & Yeager, 2004; VanSledright, 2010; Virta, 2002). Many history lessons might, therefore, have a strong focus on historical content knowledge (Saye & Social Studies Inquiry Research Collaborative, 2013; VanSledright, 2011).
4.2.2 Observing history education
To explore the challenges and problems that history teachers face, qualitative research studies have been conducted (e.g., Bain & Mirel, 2006; Fogo, 2014; Monte- Sano & Cochran, 2009; Virta, 2007). However, few quantitative research studies using standardized instruments have been conducted to explore history teachers’ competencies (Adler, 2008; Ritter, 2012). For example, only two studies used observation instruments to examine how teachers actually teach historical content knowledge and historical reasoning competencies. Thus, the use of standardized observation instruments in research on history education is an underexamined topic, as Van Hover et al. (2012) noted:
While the field of history education elucidates a clear and ambitious vision of high-quality history instruction, a current challenge for history educators (including teacher educators, curriculum specialists, and school-based history and social science supervisors) becomes how to illuminate and capture this when observing classrooms to research history instruction or to provide useful discipline-specific feedback to preservice (and inservice) history teachers. (p. 604)
Testing an observation instrument
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