Capturing Historical Thinking Competencies

Measuring historical thinking competencies requires psychometrically adequately constructed, standardized instruments. The HiTCH instrument (Historical Thinking – Competencies in History) offers closed tasks to gather historical competencies reliably and validly. Furthermore in the project CAHis (Computational Assessmant of Historical Competencies) we ask ourselves how to analyse open-ended texts by students.


HiTCH: Historical Thinking – Competencies in History: How can historical competencies be recorded in a standardized instrument?

The main goal of the initially by the BMBF funded cooperative project HiTCH (Historical Thinking Competences in History) funded joint project was to establish an adequat standardized instrument to measure historical thinking competencies. Overall nine universities and universities of applied sciences from Germany, Switzerland and Austria participated. The HiTCH-consortium developed a valid and reliable measurement instrument (HiTCH test). The first HiTCH test („HiTCH 1.0“) includes 91 continuously standardized tasks and has already been tested in two big tablet studies but also in various dissertations and final papers. For the DFG-Eyewitnesses Study selected tasks are also going to be used. Right now an online version („HiTCH 2.0) is developed at the Insitute of Quality Development in Schleswig-Holstein (IQSH) in which further tasks from the latest big validation study are included. Within the HiTCH consortium we are right now working on new tasks. As soon as the Corona pandemic permits pilot testing will start in 2021 and the validation study in the following year.

HiTCH-Website

HiTCH published! Download the eBooks here

Cooperation: Hector-Insitut für Empirische Bildungsforschung, Fachhochschule Nordwestschweiz, Katholische Universität Eichstätt-Ingolstadt, Universität Tübingen, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Universität Hamburg,  Universität Salzburg, PH Salzberg

Contact person: Christiane Bertram

Publications:

Bertram, C., Wagner, W., Werner, M., Trautwein, U. & Schreiber, W (2019). Vier Jahre Unterricht mit dem mBook Belgien: Zu den Kompetenz- und Interessensverläufen der Lernenden von der neunten bis zwölften Klasse. In M. Waldis & B. Ziegler & (Hrsg.)., Forschungswerkstatt Geschichtsdidaktik 17, Beiträge zur Tagung "geschichtsdidaktik empirisch 17" (Reihe Geschichtsdidaktik heute). Bern: hep-Verlag.

Bertram, C. & Wagner, W. (2017). Der Weg von NAEP zu HiTCH – Erfassung historischer Kompetenzen in standardisierten Formaten am Beispiel von Aufgaben zur US-Geschichte. In M. Waldis & B. Ziegler (Hrsg.), Forschungswerkstatt Geschichtsdidaktik 15, Beiträge zur Tagung "geschichtsdidaktik empirisch 15" (Reihe Geschichtsdidaktik heute) (S. 212-226). Bern: hep-Verlag.

Trautwein, U., Bertram, C., Borries, B. von, Körber, A., Schreiber, W., Schwan, S., …, Zuckowski, A. (2016). Entwicklung und Validierung eines historischen Kompetenztests zum Einsatz in Large-Scale-Assessments (HiTCH). In BMBF (Hrsg.), Forschung in Ankopplung an Large-Scale Assessments (S. 97-120). Bonn: Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung.

Trautwein, U., Bertram, C., Borries, B. von, Brauch, N., Hirsch, M., Klausmeier, K., …, Zuckowski, A. (2017). Kompetenzen historischen Denkens erfassen – Konzeption, Operationalisierung und Befunde des Projekts „Historical Thinking – Competencies in History“ (HiTCH). Münster: Waxmann-Verlag.

CAHist (Computational Assessment of Historical Competencies) – How can texts by students be computational evaluated?

Standardized recording of historical competencies is often critisized as not being able to meet the competencies of historical thinking (e.g. Smith & Breakstone 2017; VanSledright, 2014). It is questionable if open-ended answer formats are a suitable form to capture historical thinking and, if so, how a … (Erfassung) can be implemented into large-scale surveys.

The main goal of this interdisciplinary CAHis project is to analyse students‘ texts on the basis of an elaborated codesystem and to expand this towards an automatic manual coding. The foundation of this project are texts by students from the (first) eyewitnesses study (N=972) from Christiane Bertram. Students carried out seven open tasks with deconstructing and reconstructing work steps. The study shows how qualitative methods (manual code system and manual coding of subsamples as „gold standard“) interact with quantitative methods (training of computers with a code system and coded data) to carry out an automatic analysis and assessment of students‘ texts.

Cooperation: Zarah Weiß, Ramon Ziai, Computerlinguistik, Universität Tübingen & Lisa Zachrich, Hector-Institut für Empirische Bildungsforschung, Universität Tübingen

Contact person: Christiane Bertram

Publication:

Bertram, C., Ziai, R., Weiß, Z. & Zachrich, L. (in Überarbeitung). Artificial Intelligence in the Field of History: Automating Assessments of Open-Ended History Tasks Through Computational Linguistic Content and Complexity Analyses. 

Talks:

Bertram, C. (März 2020). KI im Fach Geschichte - Wie künstliche Intelligenz bei der inhaltlichen und sprachlichen Beurteilung von Schülerantworten genutzt werden kann. Jahrestagung der Gesellschaft für empirische Bildungsforschung (GEBF), Potsdam. Link zum Tagungsprogramm.

Bertram, C., Weiß, Z. & Ziai, R. (April 2017). Automatic evaluation of students’ writings on history—First steps in the computer-based evaluation using complexity analyses and content Assessment. Vortrag im Rahmen des Symposiums „Teaching and assessing historical Thinking: New approaches and empirical results”. Jahrestagung der American Educational Research Association (AERA), San Antonio, USA.