Design Principles and Rubrics for Assessing Historical Thinking: Connections to the C3 and the ELA Common Core
Design Principles and Rubrics for Assessing Historical Thinking: Connections to the C3 and the ELA Common Core
Standardized test items, and summative classroom tests that look like them (e.g., multiple choice questions about historical details), are rather limited in giving us good data about students' thinking and engagement. If we want to cultivate 21st-century, cognitive habits of mind among our students, we need better assessment tools to help us see if our teaching practices actually promote them. This investigation focuses on designing those “better tools” (e.g., performance-based assessments) by providing some examples of how to construct them, put them to use in the classroom, gather useful learning evidence from them, and understand and use that evidence to systematically improve teaching and learning in history. The principles that sit behind these assessment designs and uses also could be modified and applied to other subjects in the social studies. So, although the focus here is history, the principles of good assessment design go beyond that subject and could be of interest to those who teach economics, government, and geography.
Objectives
The objectives of this investigation are to assist participants in:
- understanding how to construct useful assessments of and rubrics for historical thinking that are linked to the C3 and the ELA Common Core: Literacy in History/Social Studies,
- making sense of the principles behind the assessments and rubrics that yield powerful data for gauging learning, and
- practicing the application and analysis of assessment data in order to adjust history teaching in ways that improve student learning.
This investigation has three parts: Investigate, Create and Connect. Please be sure to do all three sections.
Investigate:
Engagement One: An Exploration of the Principles for Good Classroom-Based Assessment Design in History
(Bruce VanSledright, Presenter)
Access PowerPoint slides used for this presentation here.
This Web seminar presentation takes you through a number of steps in thinking about creating sound assessments that you can use to measure growth in historical thinking. It draws from the Assessment Triangle introduced by Pellegrino et al. (2001) in the book, Knowing What Students Know. The Assessment Triangle and hinges on three pillars:
- Cognition taken from a learning model in history education (VanSledright, 2011, Chapters 3 and 4, The Challenge of Rethinking History Education is helpful here).
- Observation that involves designing performance tasks that generate good data on students’ historical thinking capabilities.
- Interpretation that relates to using rubrics and criteria for understanding the data generated by the performance tasks.
Engagement Two: Self-Guided Practice on Constructing and Evaluating Historical Thinking Performance Assessments to Use in Your Classroom
Perhaps the most curious but also most complex to design of the performance-based assessments of historical thinking are the weighted multiple-choice items (WMCs) that you encountered in Engagement One. They are curious because they are designed “upside down” from typical, standard multiple choice items. In typical items, there is only one correct option and three incorrect distractors, as some people call them. In WMCs, there are three possible acceptable choices that are weighted in descending order, and only one incorrect option.
WMCs give us a chance to honor the interpretive and often indeterminate nature of history, to assess actual historical thinking constructs, and do it all with somewhat reduced “grading demands” on history teachers who would otherwise prefer what DBQs measure. It also should be said that WMCs that are designed following the principles outlined in Engagement One and are tied closely to the Cognitive Learning Model discussed there, cohere exceptionally well with both the C3 Dimensions and Dimension 4 in particular, and with the indicators in ELA Common Core Literacy in History/Social Studies.
As a team, use these Powerpoint slides to evaluate the WMC examples offered in the web seminar. Slice them and dice them in an effort to see what they are made of and how they work. Think about the item's purpose, the rubric-like scale for each selection with a rationale. Doing so should provide additional practice in coming to understand these curious types of performance-assessment items.
If you need a refresher, return to the Web seminar from Engagement One: Design Principles and Rubrics for Assessing Historical Thinking and begin watching at 46:16 through to the end.
Reflect and Discuss
Take a look again at Dimension 4 in the C3 and also the ELA Common Core Standards and study the indicators there. Do the WMC items illustrated in this Web seminar map onto those indicators? If so, how? If not, why might that be?
Engagement Three: Explore Additional Performance Assessment Resources for Use in the History Classroom
There are many good assessment resources available for use in the history classroom. Extend your understanding of classroom-based performance assessment by examining the following resources:
View the following short YouTube clips.
Discuss with your team: Do they follow good design principles in their suggestions?
- Assessment Quickies: Analyzing Evidence of Student Learning: Focuses on linking assessment to student learning
- Assessment Quickies: Collecting Assessment Evidence: Focuses on principles for gathering evidence of student learning
- Assessment Quickies: Choosing Assessment Measures: Focuses on choosing appropriate classroom-based assessments of student learning
Explore the resources available at the following four websites. They contain a number of different ideas around which you can build classroom-based assessments that validly measure historical thinking.
Discuss with your team: How do they compare to the examples we have examined so far? Better? Worse? More, or less, valid measures of historical thinking?
- Assessment Resource Center for History (ARCH)
- Beyond the Bubble
- "Assessing Historical Thinking" at the Historical Thinking Project, Centre for Historical Consciousness (CA)
- Assessing Historical Thinking Skills Using Library of Congress Primary Sources, Vol. 6, No. 1, Spring 2013
Post a summarizing reflection as a blog post in your group space to share the highlights of your group's discussions about designing WMCs and other performance assessments. Tag this post with "Assessing Historical Thinking."
Additional resources for diving deeper into this topic of assessment:
- Ercikan, K., & Seixas, P. (Eds.) (2015). New directions in assessing historical thinking. New York: Routledge.
- Pellegrino, J., Chudowsky, N., & Glaser, R. (Eds.) (2001). Knowing what students know: The science and design of educational assessment. Washington, DC: National Academies Press.
- VanSledright, B. (2011). The challenge of rethinking history education: On practices, theories, and policy. New York: Routledge. (Chapter 6 especially)
- VanSledright, B. (2014). Assessing historical thinking and understanding: Innovative designs for new standards. New York: Routledge.
- Together with your team, refer back to the assessment strategies presented above. Design some common history performance assessments around a series of units you teach. Administer these assessments in a pre-instruction/post-instruction structure and see what they yield.
- Schedule time with your colleagues to collectively learn to interpret the results, drawing off rubrics, criteria, and rationales you’ve constructed or borrowed. Collectively improve the quality of the items you create and allow you to begin developing a test bank of performance-based items for use and re-use in your history classrooms through shared critique and analysis of student responses. The validity and reliability of your items should grow over time as you extend this work. Consider using a protocol for Looking at Student Work to guide the conversation.
Create a new blog post in your Exchange group to share examples of the assessments your created as well as the results of your interpretation of the results. Provide a description of what you chose to develop and why. Also share the context the assessment is intended for (topic, grade-level, etc). You can use the upload attachment function to upload the assessment or any other documents. Include the topic tag "Designing Assessments."
Connect
As a group, consider the following:
What?
When we consider these ideas of meaningful assessment, what practices do we already have in place that exhibit these properties and what practices are currently missing.
So What?
Why do these ideas of purposeful assessment and making shifts in our own practices align with C3 and their links to the ELA Common Core Standards in Literacy for History/Social Studies? Why do these practices matter for our students and families?
Now What?
What are our next steps in designing and using valid performance-based classroom assessments in history? What will we try out in our classrooms? What additional questions do we want to explore in this area? How might we influence the practices of others across the school?
Summarizing Blog
- In your group's space on the Exchange, post a blog that speaks to your group's reflections about creating performance-based classroom assessments, and what you feel you learned from this shared process. Tag this post with "Assessing Historical Thinking Summary.”
- In the Coach-to-Coach discussion, share from one team leader to another what went well and what you would do differently next time around. Be sure to mention which investigation you are working on and provide a link to your team's space so that others can see what's been shared.