Performance Assessments Requiring Historical Analysis

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Silkscreen, "For greater knowledge. . . ," Federal Art Project, 1940, LoC
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A group of schools are working on common performance assessments, defined as a question requiring a written response in which the student must apply skills of historical analysis to answer the question. (i.e. More than directed writing response.) We are looking for exemplars of such items. Can you direct us to some?

Answer

A great place to start is Oakland Unified's History and Social Studies page, specifically the left column on the page. The site offers historical questions with assessments and support materials designed to improve historical reading, writing, and thinking. Examples available were designed for the 8th and 11th grades, but the concepts can be applied to any age group.

Another place to look for performance assessments that focus on historical analysis is the College Board's website. Their "Sample Questions and Scoring Guidelines" page has free response questions—"Document Based Questions"—and scoring guidelines dating back for the past several AP US History exams.

The thematic essay from the New York Regents exam is also worth a look. It's a good example of a written assessment that asks students to apply the skills of historical analysis, and the "United States History and Government" page has tests from the past several years. The page includes a scoring key and rating guide that specifically looks at the thematic essay, and which includes a wide selection of student responses.

. . . a number of lessons available online, which include evaluation rubrics and examples of student work.

Benchmarks of Historical Thinking, a Canadian website, is also a good resource. They have a number of lessons available online, which include evaluation rubrics and examples of student work. This example, for instance, is an assignment that asks students to write a letter to a Holocaust survivor and includes attachments, such as the task description at the bottom of the page.

Historical Thinking Matters also has tasks and examples of student work. Their "Teacher Materials and Strategies" page gives you access to four thematic topics, each of which has examples of student responses to historical prompts that ask them to use primary sources as evidence. Two examples of student work for each topic, like this essay and this essay about the Spanish-American War, or like this essay and this essay about the Scopes trial, are also useful tools.

UPDATE (Oct. 26, 2012): Be sure to check out the Stanford History Education Group's Beyond the Bubble, a user-friendly site where you can find shorter assessments, interactive rubrics, examples of student work, and a video about how to construct your own.

Resources on Native American History

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Photo, Woman from Plains with baby, c. 1901, Library of Congress
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I teach Native American history/studies. . . It is difficult finding curriculum and good lessons for these subjects. I would really like to find a good text book but have not been able to. . . [A]ny ideas or suggestions would be helpful. . .

Answer

There are several textbook-y resources available that we like. Consider the readers in the Bedford Series in History and Culture. Three of these paperback readers address Native American history, including The Cherokee Removal and The World Turned Upside Down: Indian Voices from Early America. Each of the readers begins with an introductory essay that provides an overview narrative of the topic and its historiographical context. Following this essay are selected primary and secondary sources accompanied by orienting background information. Depending on the ages and abilities of your students, these readers can serve as a resource for creating source-based activities and lectures, or for older and more capable students, they can be a kind of textbook. However, be forewarned, if you are working with younger students, you will likely need to further excerpt and prepare many of the provided sources.

For a lengthier survey textbook that is popular and worth investigating, try First Peoples by Colin G. Calloway. Also consider the documentary series, We Shall Remain, a recent entry in the excellent PBS series, The American Experience. You can find teaching activities and full episodes on the series’ companion website. Also see this blog for links related to this series. All of these resources can help you craft lessons that emphasize both the diversity of Native Americans and the fact that they are still with us today—two ideas that challenge many students’ misconceptions about this topic.

Building a Class on Native American History

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Photo, "2005 Powwow," Kristine Brumley, Smithsonian Institution, Flickr Commons
Question

I would like to develop an elective for teaching Native American history. I am looking for a class on teaching Native American history. If you could let me know of any classes, books, or other ancillary materials I would appreciate it very much.

Answer

The National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC offers a variety of resources about American Indian history including workshops for teachers.

For resources you can use with students, see our response to a teacher who asked about classroom resources for teaching a Native American history course.

We also recommend contacting local tribes and organizations directly to see what resources they recommend that you use to learn about their history. Below are some organizations you might consider:

We also recommend contacting local tribes and organizations directly to see what resources they recommend that you use to learn about their history.

In Connecticut, the Mashantucket Pequot Museum & Research Center provides a wealth of resources. They offer professional development to teachers as well. The center also offers workshops on how to evaluate books and other materials about Native Americans and have several educational programs for students based on the Connecticut Curriculum framework. The center designs workshops based on teacher interest as well. The Mashantucket Pequot Museum & Research Center provides a recommended reading list and a research library.

If you will be in Minnesota for the summer you may want to check out the American Indian Policy Center in St. Paul and The Minnesota Indian Affairs Council. These organizations offer resources, and can most likely direct you to additional educational resources.

You can search the NHEC site for relevant local museums, websites, and professional development opportunities. If you have not done so already, remember to also check the course offerings at your local colleges.

All Hands on Deck

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Oil on canvas, 1884, USS Constitution. . . , Davidson, USS Constitution Museum
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The USS Constitution Museum developed All Hands on Deck as a means of introducing K–12 educational elements across subjects (math, art, and more) using the history of one of the United States' most renowned military vessels, the USS Constitution.

The website itself is somewhat disorganized. However, there are a plethora of lesson plans embedded within it for students of any grade level.

The available lessons are divided into five sections—preview activities (to determine pre-existing knowledge), the building of early U.S. military frigates, the War of 1812 and the Barbary Wars, 1800s life aboard a warship, and the lasting legacy of the USS Constitution. These sections have subsections, within which you can find individual lessons intended for grades K–4, 5–8, and 9–12. Alternatively, visiting "How to Use This Online Curriculum" includes a linked list of states. Clicking on any of the available states—IL, MD, WA, SC, TN, MO, TX, NM, CO, MT, and VA—offers a list of the activities available on the website which correlate with state standards. The individual subsections also include recommended field trip sites, films, books, games, music, and more; as well as anecdotes, literature, and other "grab bag" additional items of interest.

The Image Gallery offers a smattering of paintings, illustrations, and photographs of the vessel and its officers. The gallery also contains a single newspaper recruitment ad dating to 1798.

Educators who would prefer a tangible copy of the curriculum can send an electronic request.

Alternatively, you may want to brush up on your USS Constitution history yourself. In that case, the website offers a 19-minute video in which a young girl meets a variety of figures aboard the ship—a captain's wife, a powder monkey, and an African American sailor among them.

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Vitamins in Chocolate Cake: Why Use Historical Fiction in the Classroom?

Date Published
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Photography, Child Reading with Teddy Bear, 18 December 2010, Jennifer Durfey, F
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One of the great pleasures of my job as a writer for American Girl is getting letters from my young readers. Over the years, I’ve had tens of thousands of letters, every one as unique, sweet, earnest, and quirky as its writer. Very often, my correspondent asks me, “Why do you write about people who lived long ago?” And I write back, “Because I love thinking about what your life or my life would have been like if we had lived in another time, don’t you?” But that answer tells only one reason why I write historical fiction, and why I think it is a good idea to use historical fiction to teach history. There are other reasons, too.

First, I think historical fiction can make history matter—make it irresistible—to young readers. And it is important to make history matter, because reading about the past not only gives children factual information—sort of a mental timeline, for example, so that they know that the Revolutionary War happened before the Civil War—but learning about the past also allows, encourages, and teaches a child to identify with other voices, views, cultures, and times, which is a good life skill. Reading about the past teaches empathy and compassion. It helps a child see the similarities that lie just underneath our differences.

What we’re trying to do through historical fiction is to help our students realize they are what history is.

Ah, but how do we capture the children’s interest? How do we pique their curiosity? How do we engage their imaginations? Well, that’s the magic of historical fiction. And that magic is a second reason why I write historical fiction, and why I think it is good to use it in the classroom. I believe that good historical fiction exercises a child’s imagination through a vicarious experience. It leads children to use themselves and their own lives as comparisons to the characters that lived long ago and often, far away, to reflect on their own experience, to ask their families questions. It awakens awareness, perks up perception, sparks conversations. Reading historical fiction can lead a child to ask, ”What’s my voice? What’s my view? Which side should I be on? Is there a right side?“ So really, what we’re trying to do through historical fiction is to help our students realize they are what history is. What they do matters. They had better pay attention. What we’re trying to do is to sort of tickle a moral intelligence, a mindfulness, a sense of responsibility, into being.

Historical fiction helps us fire up our students and readers because it uses emotion to make the facts matter.

Helping children to be empathetic to others and more aware of themselves are two good and worthy reasons to use historical fiction, but to me, there’s a third reason that’s most important of all. I think the best word to describe it is delight. Teachers and writers want to inspire enthusiasm. We want to say to children, “Oh, look! Isn’t that cool? Can you believe how wacky and wild and fascinating the world is? The universe is abundant and it’s all out there waiting for you.” Historical fiction helps us fire up our students and readers because it uses emotion to make the facts matter. It uses emotion to teach gentle life lessons, and to form a ribbon of connection between the child in the classroom and the characters in the story.

Good historical fiction is funny, challenging, amusing, absorbing, scary, sad, and full of—here’s that word again—delight. Historical fiction is inspired by the child and inspires the child in return. It celebrates the child. It respects the child. Good historical fiction meets readers where they are right now, engaged with school, family, and friends, feeling the drives for love and friendship, and feeling the conflict between being a member of society and yet defining one’s self as a unique and independent being. It grows out of the child’s nature, which is energetic, curious, merry, passionate, exuberant, and earnest. So you might say that my readers themselves are another reason why I write historical fiction. And your students are the reason why historical fiction is a sturdy and effective vehicle for teaching history and a gift—a very good gift—to use in the classroom.

For more information

Say you're already using historical fiction in the classroom—what about asking your students to write some of their own? High school teacher Ron Gorr has some ideas. Just as students should read historical fiction along with primary and secondary sources, so should students write it drawing on primary and secondary sources. Ask students how they think their fiction (and the fiction they read) reflects the writer as well as her or his historical research. What in the story shows modern ways of thinking? What might people living at the time the stories are set in think if they read them?

Shays' Rebellion and the Making of a Nation

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Photography, Shay's Rebellion Monument, 15 Jul 2010, Flickr CC
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This website is the result of a collaboration among Springfield Technical Community College (STCC), the Springfield Armory, and the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association (PVMA). The site provides a narrative of Shays’ Rebellion told through images, summaries, and primary sources—a wealth of materials for classroom teachers.

The Shays’ Rebellion website is designed to be navigated through a series of six historic scenes. Framed on either end by a prologue and epilogue, the scenes present the perspectives of key groups involved in the run-up to rebellion, as well as its aftermath. In “A Bloody Encounter,” for instance, the assault by Shays and his men on the Springfield arsenal is represented in pictures. By rolling a cursor over the image, users can learn more about the scene—the great strength of this approach is that information is contextualized and given greater meaning.

One of the most unique features on the site is that each scene is accompanied by the commentary of eyewitnesses and other figures from the time period. With background knowledge acquired from the scene and brief synopses of events, users are well prepared to understand these commentaries—an excellent use of primary sources.

The site can also be navigated by people, by artifacts and documents, or by themes and essays. Exploring it in any of these ways, however, can be a chaotic experience. The site also includes resources for extension activities like songs and music, a timeline, and a series of historic maps.

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The Encyclopedia of Arkansas History and Culture

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Government worker helps Cuban refugees who have immigrated to Arkansas
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This website functions as an easy-to-maneuver and reader-friendly website for gathering information about Arkansas and its impact on American history. Entries are divided into two categories: text and media. Both include subdivisions based on alphabetical listings or gallery images (respectively) in addition to category, type, time period, race and ethnicity, and gender. The Media section offers numerous photos, maps, documents, and video and audio resources. Entries include suggested readings, related links, and media galleries, when applicable.

Some of the more useful features of the site includes a calendar describing events in Arkansas’s history on each day, as well as a photo of the day from the Arkansas gallery. An overview entry provides general information about the state for those beginning to conduct research about Arkansas, and a breadcrumb trail at the top of each page helps readers retrace their steps while visiting the site—a feature users will find very helpful.

Educators will also find more than 100 lesson plans marked by The Butler Center—when planning for topics such as the Civil War, Korean War, and who’s who in Arkansas history. Lesson plans are in PDF format.

Teachers and students will enjoy exploring how the Razorback State played a key role in U.S. history. Teachers will also find the lesson plans from the Butler Center a useful resource for classroom instruction.

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The Oregon Encyclopedia

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image of an explorer overlooking an Oregon lake
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This website is a collaboration between Portland State University, the Oregon Council of Teachers of English, and the Oregon Historical Society, and is a key project of the Oregon Sesquicentennial Celebration. Beyond its basic function as a reference tool, The Oregon Encyclopedia provides lesson plans for teachers—primarily for grades 4–12. The site is divided into 17 categories, each one with several subcategories such as "biography," "event," "group," or "place." Entries include a brief history, or synopsis, of the topic with any accompanying media objects and suggested reading. Entries are arranged alphabetically or by topic with a search engine that allows searches based on category, theme, sub-theme, county, era, or region. Each week new entries are added to the hundreds currently online.

In the For Teachers section, users will find several sections. "History Minutes" contains facts about important topics related to the state. The "Oregon IQ Test" offers a short list of Oregon trivia questions. The "Permissions" and "How to Cite" pages outline the educational and fair use policies to help students navigate copyright policies. Under "Research Tools," users will find a list of annotated bibliographies, as well as the ability to conduct a live chat with an online librarian any time of day—even during the weekends.

Oregon and U.S. history teachers and students will find The Oregon Encyclopedia a useful resource for learning more about the nation's 33rd state and its role in U.S. history.

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