Page 92 - Balancing between the present and the past

Chapter 4
introduction of the concept of historical contextualization) to each formulate 20 items that assess classroom teachers’ behavior in regards to historical contextualization. Combining these items with the items that we formulated resulted in a total of 121 items.
Meta-analyses on effective teaching illustrate that promoting different types of interactions in classrooms (i.e., student-student interactions and teacher-student interactions) could promote student learning (Kyriakides et al., 2013; Seidel & Shavelson, 2007). Therefore, we formulated three items (the teacher asks evaluative questions; the teacher uses classroom discussion; the teacher uses group work), focusing on more generic teacher strategies and different (social) interactions in the classrooms. We included these three generic items because history education research shows that these types of interaction could promote historical reasoning competencies (e.g., Brooks, 2008; Van Drie & Van Boxtel, 2008; Van Drie, Van Boxtel, & Van der Linden, 2006; Stoel et al., 2015). Therefore, the total list included 124 items. By excluding double items and items that might be very difficult to evaluate, we shortened the list to 82 items. For example, we first included individual items for all time indicators (e.g., year, period, and century), but we then incorporated these items into one item, “the teacher gives time indicators.” Another example is that we excluded items focusing on the specific economic, political, and social circumstances (e.g., form of government, welfare, scientific knowledge, wars, and laws) of historical phenomena. Because these specific circumstances are difficult to observe in one history lesson, we included only items such as “appoints political/governance characteristics at the time of phenomena” and “appoints socio-cultural characteristics at the time of phenomena.” This method might result in a less nuanced image of a lesson, but we preferred to develop an instrument that allows us to observe all behavior indicators in a single history lesson.
Next, we organized two expert panel discussions to further shorten the list of 82 items and ensure the instrument’s face and content validity. The first panel discussion was held with two history teacher educators and seven secondary-school history teachers. The second panel discussion was held with one history teacher educator and four secondary-school history teachers. All experts had more than 7 years of work experience. The experts were asked to (1) remove unnecessary items that did not measure history teachers’ competency in terms of promoting historical contextualization, (2) remove possible multiple items that might cover the same
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