Search

The ability to apply various reading skills is an important prerequisite to comprehend expository texts commonly found in history textbooks, but it is unclear which specific skills contribute to students' historical content knowledge and historical reasoning abilities. This study used a digital learning environment (DLE) to measure and support lower secondary students' subject-specific reading skills, and explored the relationships with students' historical content knowledge and historical reasoning ability. Results showed that subject-specific reading skills, such as explaining historical events, correlated significantly with both historical content knowledge and historical reasoning ability, but not all skills were significant predictors. These findings indicate that to promote the advanced practice of historical reasoning, history teachers should pay attention to students' reading comprehension skills.

Imagining what it was like to live in the past may help secondary school students to understand historical developments and situations. In this case study, the opportunities of a drama task are explored by using a mixed-method approach. In small groups, Dutch 14-15-year-old students examined historical sources and produced a short film clip on daily life in the Netherlands during the Cold War. Results indicated that both the students and their teacher perceived the drama task as motivating. The group discussions were rich in on-task utterances, and the students reported that they thought the task was valuable for gaining insight into thoughts and feelings of people in the past. However, the clips were relatively poor in information, and the assessment proved to be a challenge for the teacher.

The aim of this observational study is to explore how history teachers promote historical contextualisation in their lessons. Historical contextualisation is the ability to situate phenomena and individuals' actions in the context of time, historical location, long-term developments, or specific events to give meaning to these phenomena and actions. Using the "Framework for Analysing the Teaching of Historical Contextualisation" (FAT-HC), five trained raters observed eight history teachers twice. To further analyse the observation scores, the FAT-HC items were divided into eight categories while distinguishing between items that demonstrate historical contextualisation and items focusing on engaging students in historical contextualisation processes. The results indicate that the teachers in the sample did not explicitly promote historical contextualisation in their lessons. No teacher obtained a mean FAT-HC score >2.00 on a four-point scale. The teachers mainly demonstrated historical contextualisation, while engaging students in historical contextualisation processes was observed far less often. The findings can be used to help teachers formulate domain-specific instruction to promote students' ability to perform historical contextualisation.

This exploratory study presents an example of how a historical contextualization framework can be used to develop and implement a lesson unit on Cold War events. The effects of the lesson unit on students' ability to perform historical contextualization are explored in a quasi-experimental pre-test--post-test design with an experimental (n = 96) and a control (n = 73) condition. The students' answers on a historical contextualization test were analysed. The results indicate that students in the experimental condition increased their ability to perform historical contextualization and displayed less present-oriented perspectives in their answers compared to students in the control condition.

In this article, which is based on Huijgen's PhD dissertation "Balancing between the past and the present", Tim Huijgen and Paul Holthuis present the results of an experimental method of teaching 14-16-year-old students to contextualise their historical studies in a different way. In the four lessons described, students' initial reactions to aspects of the 1950s Cold War were challenged by explicitly teaching them to build historical context, and then to revisit their initial impressions of what, for example, it might have been like to have been an American schoolchild being asked to 'duck and cover'. The article also provides a wider argument for the importance of historical context both as something for students to be taught to create and as a potential barrier in historical learning. This is part of a wider project, and resources are provided to show how this might be done with a larger range of topics.

The aim of this explorative study was to develop and test a pedagogy aimed at promoting students' ability to perform historical contextualization. Teaching historical contextualization was conceptualized in terms of four pedagogical design principles: (1) making students aware of the consequences of a present-oriented perspective when examining the past, (2) enhancing the reconstruction of a historical context, (3) enhancing the use of the historical context to explain historical phenomena and (4) enhancing historical empathy. The effectiveness of these principles was explored in a lesson unit focusing on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In a quasi-experimental pre-test-post-test design with experimental and control conditions, the effects of the pedagogy on 15- and 16-year-old students' ability to perform historical contextualization were examined (n = 131). The results indicated that students in the experimental condition significantly improved their ability to perform historical contextualization compared to students in the control condition. These findings could be used to help teachers and other educational professionals design and implement historical contextualization tasks and instructions.

Since the 1970s, many observation instruments have been constructed to map teachers' general pedagogic competencies. However, few of these instruments focus on teachers' subject-specific competencies. This study presents the development of the "Framework for Analyzing the Teaching of Historical Contextualization" (FAT-HC). This high-inference observation instrument focuses on history teachers' competency in promoting historical contextualization in classrooms. The results of the study demonstrate the instrument's content validity. Generalizability studies were conducted to further assess the instrument's dimensionality and reliability by decomposing the instrument's variance. A large proportion of the variance was explained by differences between observed teachers, and a small proportion of the variance was explained by lessons and observers, demonstrating the instrument's reliability. Furthermore, a decision study was conducted to determine the optimal number of observers and lessons needed for a reliable scoring design. The developed instrument could be used to gain greater insight into history teachers' subject-specific competencies and to focus teacher professionalization on teachers' specific needs.

An important goal of history education is to promote the student's ability to perform historical perspective taking (HPT). HPT refers to the ability to understand how people in the past viewed their world at various times and in various places to explain why they did what they did. In this study, we assessed a sample of 15- and 16-year-old pre-university students (n = 170) to determine their ability to contextualize the actions of people in the past. Subsequently, we explored their reasoning (n = 36) to uncover their contextualization process. The results of this mixed methodology study indicate that most of the students in the sample performed well when engaging in HPT. Moreover, protocol analysis identified the different reasoning strategies that students employed to successfully perform HPT. The results of this study provide insight into history instruction regarding HPT and into strategies for designing valid and reliable HPT tasks.

Historical reasoning competencies play an important role in history education. However, valid and reliable large-scale measurement instruments to assess these competencies are scarce. This study considers two instruments for measuring students' ability to perform historical perspective taking (HPT) as a historical reasoning competency. The instruments have been tested for validity and reliability among 1,270 Dutch upper elementary and secondary school students, ranging in age from 10 to 17 years. One instrument offers effective validity and reliability and can map HPT performance among a large and heterogeneous student population. The results show that even upper elementary school students are capable of performing HPT. However, as students age, their ability to perform HPT increases. Differences regarding the ability to perform HPT were also found between educational levels. Pre-university students performed HPT more successfully compared to students at lower educational levels. The results of this study can be used to gain insight into the construct of HPT and into how historical reasoning competencies such as HPT can be measured. Furthermore, the results provide insight into how differences between students, such as age and educational levels, influence the performance of HPT.