A Guided Approach to Historical Inquiry in the K-12 Classroom
Assessing Student Learning
Watch teachers (informally) assess student learning in the classroom. Teachers and administrators discuss how historical thinking and literacy skills are evaluated through History Labs.
Assessing students’ historical thinking is different than measuring their knowledge of historical content. While the two are not mutually exclusive, traditional assessments of history have focused on the recall of specific facts through multiple-choice, true-false, fill-in-the-blank, or matching questions, as well as short-answer responses and identifications. In contrast, the History Labs model seeks to assess the skills and complexity of the thinking and understanding behind student interpretations of evidence and responses to overarching questions.
Forms of assessment to measure historical thinking in History Labs include:
Quick Writes
The teacher poses questions that require students to connect the evidence they examined to the overarching question guiding the History Lab. The teacher then assesses whether students have made the connection. Sample writing prompts for assessments of student thinking include:
The two pieces of evidence that most complemented one another were ...because...
The two pieces of evidence that most contradicted one another were...because...
The most important/insightful piece of evidence was...because...
The least useful/helpful piece of evidence was...because. . .
_____ provided the following challenges...
A useful piece of evidence to have had would have been...because...
The subtext/context of _____ complicated matters because...
Argumentative and persuasive essays
These formal writing opportunities rely on the evidence examined in the History Lab. In composing an essay, students must cite information from the text of a source and discuss how the author, purpose, and context influenced the key information. Written assessments of History Labs differ from the Document Based Questions (DBQ) format used by the College Board in Advanced Placement courses. In History Labs, students must address the sourcing, corroboration, close-reading and contextualizing of the evidence in their responses.
The field of assessment for history education is evolving. The UMBC Center for History Education, in partnership with the Howard County Public School System in Maryland, has developed ARCH: Assessment Resource Center for History. The website includes a selection of formative and summative assessment items, information on their use in the history classroom, and a scoring rubric for evaluating students' historical thinking skills.
“In a history classroom, skills and process are linked together, just like they are in a math classroom or an English classroom. It is hard to separate those two things. The difference is you are assessing students’ application, as opposed to what they remember.” —Teacher
Center for History Education“In a history classroom, skills and process are linked together, just like they are in a math classroom or an English classroom. It is hard to separate those two things. The difference is you are assessing students’ application, as opposed to what they remember.”