Page 86 - Balancing between the present and the past

Chapter 4
Nokes (2010) used an observation instrument and focused on history teachers’ literacy-related decisions about the types of texts they used and how students were taught to learn with these texts. Eight secondary-school history teachers were observed over a 3-week period using two frequency counting observation instruments, one instrument to record the type of texts and one to record teachers’ activities and instruction; however, detailed information about the instruments’ validity and (inter- rater) reliability is lacking. The other study was conducted by Van Hover et al. (2012), the only researchers who attempted to construct a subject-specific observation instrument, called the PATH, with the goal of evaluating and improving history instruction. PATH has the same structure as Pianta and Hamre’s (2009) Classroom Assessment Scoring System-Secondary (CLASS-S) and consists of six dimensions: (1) lesson components, (2) comprehension, (3) narrative, (4) interpretation, (5) sources, and (6) historical practices. Each dimension includes indicators and behavioral markers that are scored “high,” “middle,” and “low” by observers. The authors tested the inter-rater reliability for PATH and found positive indicators, but detailed information about the instrument’s validity and reliability is lacking.
4.2.3 Historical contextualization: a conceptualization
Rather than constructing an observation instrument for all historical reasoning competencies, we focus on how history teachers promote historical contextualization in classrooms. This focus provides us with the opportunity to spend sufficient time on item development and to test whether it is possible to observe history teachers’ subject-specific strategies using an observation instrument. We chose historical contextualization because it is considered a key competency of historical reasoning (Davies, 2010; Lévesque, 2008; Seixas & Morton, 2013) and is, therefore, included in the formal history curricula of many countries, such as Australia, Belgium, Canada, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, and the UK (Huijgen, Van Boxtel, Van de Grift, & Holthuis, 2014).
In history education, it is possible to contextualize historical sources and phenomena, including persons, events, and developments (Havekes, Coppen, Luttenberg, & Van Boxtel, 2012). Historical contextualization is the ability to situate a historical phenomenon or person in a temporal, spatial, and social context to describe, explain, compare, or evaluate it (Van Boxtel & Van Drie, 2012). Wineburg and Fournier (1994) defined historical contextualization as building a context of circumstances or facts
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