This study explores the psychometric qualities of the Relevance of History Measurement Scale (RHMS), a questionnaire designed to measure students’ beliefs about the relevance of history. Participants were 1459 Dutch secondary school students aged between 12 and 18. Data analysis revealed three reliable factors, compliant with our theoretical framework which defines three strands of relevance of history: relevance for building a personal identity, for citizenship, and for insight into ‘the human condition’. The convergent and known-groups validity of the RHMS was demonstrated. The collected data show that students find history more relevant as they grow older, with most progress taking place between 14 and 16. Out of the three strands of relevance, building a personal identity scores lowest in students’ appraisals. This study shows that the RHMS is psychometrically sound and can be used to evaluate effects of lesson interventions directed at enhancing the relevance of history to students.
COVID-19 has had a devastating impact on people worldwide. We conducted an international survey (n = 3646) examining the degree to which people's appraisals and coping activities around the pandemic predicted their health and well-being. We obtained subsamples from 12 countries-Bangladesh, Bulgaria, China, Colombia, India, Israel, the Netherlands, Norway, Peru, Portugal, Turkey and the United States. For each, we assessed appraisals and coping strategies as well as indicators of physical and mental health and well-being. Results indicated that, despite mean-level societal differences in outcomes, the pattern of appraisals and coping strategies predicting health and well-being was consistent across countries. Use of disengagement coping (particularly behavioural disengagement and self-isolation) was associated with relatively negative outcomes. In contrast, optimistic appraisals (particularly of high accommodation-focused coping potential and the ability to meet one's physical needs), use of problem-focused coping strategies (especially problem-solving) and accommodative coping strategies (especially positive reappraisal and self-encouragement) were associated with relatively positive outcomes. Our study highlights the critical importance of considering accommodative coping in stress and coping research. It also provides important information on how people have been dealing with the pandemic, the predictors of well-being under pandemic conditions and the generality of such relations.
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Although history standards generally aim at developing historical consciousness among secondary school students, there is not much research-based knowledge to support making connections between the past, the present and the future in history teaching. This study examines the effects of teaching analogous cases of an enduring human issue in two experimental conditions: one in which grade 10-12 students (n = 460) were actively encouraged to compare cases and to draw analogies with the present and one in which students studied cases without making comparisons or drawing analogies with the present (n = 273). Set against the results of a group of students who followed the usual history curriculum (n = 289), multilevel regression analyses on the collected data revealed that both experimental conditions positively affected students’ appraisals of the relevance of history, more so in the ‘case-comparison’ condition than in the ‘separate-case’ condition. Students in the case-comparison condition also deemed the lesson course more valuable and experienced less difficulty with the applied pedagogical approach than students in the separate-case condition. Case comparison did not negatively affect the acquisition of historical factual knowledge. Implications for further research are discussed.
