Assessing Learning in Social Studies

Assessment should focus, guide, and support instruction. Teachers should make observations about students’ strengths and weaknesses, analyze performance with respect to specific goals and criteria, and constantly assemble information from a variety of sources. Assessment must be used to identify goals and strategies, monitor progress, evaluate results, and improve performance.

Types of Assessment
Assessment takes a variety of formats. Traditional assessments focus on tests or written work such as essays. Performance assessments show learning in active and nontraditional formats. Alternative assessments range from metacognitive activities, such as journals, to studentgenerated assessments such as portfolios.

Formative assessment
Formative assessment is often informal. It happens throughout the instructional process to monitor progress and provide feedback, allowing students to correct errors and encouraging teachers to modify their methods. It helps students understand what they are doing well, links to classroom learning, and provides input to adjust the learning process. Students must use formative assessments to selfassess, evaluate their progress, and accept responsibility for managing their learning. Teachers must help students understand the importance of this process and teach methods for reflection and self-evaluation.

Summative assessment
Summative assessments are used to formally gauge student learning at particular points in time. They commonly occur at the end of chapters, units, or school terms to determine what students know. They can be used to track progress and reveal areas that need review. Tests and quizzes are the most common summative assessments.

Balancing assessments
Proper utilization of assessment tools in the classroom will lead to greater learning. Incorporating a variety of assessments allows for a more fully developed picture of students’ learning processes. The more information teachers have about students, the better they can judge teaching quality and student learning.

Document-Based Assessment
Students read and analyze primary source documents to acquire knowledge and develop critical thinking skills. Document analysis has also become an important assessment tool. Both the Advanced Placement examinations and many statemandated tests incorporate documentbased questions. Writing tasks may ask students to think critically about sources, form opinions guided by a prompt, and present their analysis in an essay.

Teach with primary sources
Students need direct instruction in using primary sources and evaluating conflicting interpretations. They also need repeated opportunities to practice these skills both in class and independently. Teach students to analyze primary and secondary sources by modeling a series of scaffolded questions that help students identify the document’s purpose. Begin by asking questions with concrete answers. These will form a basis for critical thinking. Consider these questions: What kind of document is this? Who wrote it? Why was it written? Who is the intended audience? The purpose of these questions is to help students identify relevant information contained in the document. The questions may also spark a class discussion or act as a focus for independent practice. Ultimately, students will evaluate documents on their own.

Differentiate with documents
Students may use documents to apply concepts they are learning to new situations and to extend learning beyond a textbook. Document analysis can also play an important role in differentiation. It may lead to small-group or whole-class discussion, written reports, in-class presentations, role-playing, or other instructional strategies.

Build skills with primary sources
Primary source analysis increases students’ critical thinking skills, prepares them for document-based questions on high-stakes tests, and reinforces the skills needed for effective citizenship. These skills include
• applying information they have learned in their study of geography.
• evaluating the reliability of sources.
• identifying the point of view of those sources and determining bias.
• identifying problems and considering a variety of solutions.
• considering issues from multiple perspectives.
• building support for a viewpoint by choosing accurate, relevant evidence.

Rubrics
A rubric is a set of guidelines for assessing student work on a continuum of quality. Holistic rubrics give an overall impression of students’ work. Analytic rubrics assign separate scores for distinct criteria. Rubrics are useful when assessing reasoning, composition, and evaluation skills.  Rubrics allow students to self-assess before submitting work. A clear definition of expections helps students to perform at the best of their ability. Students also begin to understand what areas they need to work on in order to improve.

Rubrics answer these questions:
• By what criteria will performance be judged?
• What are the elements of a quality performance?
• What does performance at each level look like?

Designing rubrics
A strong rubric
• uses descriptive language, stating what each level of quality looks like. The best rubrics thus minimize value language (“Great work,” “Poor job”) or mere comparisons across levels (“not as thorough as a 3”) to provide the most useful feedback.
• discriminates among performance levels validly—by the key features and difference in the levels of quality, not by what is easy to count or score.
• is general enough to enable inference to broad goals and state standards, but specific enough to enable useful feedback on a particular task.
• avoids combining independent criteria in the same descriptor. For example, “accuracy of facts” and “quality of the argument” are independent traits (i.e., facts may be accurate but reasoning poor and vice versa). This factor highlights the trade-off with holistic vs. analytic scoring: holistic is easier because it throws all the criteria together in one description; analytic is more work, but provides better feedback because each trait is scored separately.
• is based on specific work samples. The rubric summarizes the traits of samples of work at each level.

Rubrics reflect different aspects of performance
In a complex performance, there are several simultaneous aims with distinct traits to consider. These include
• content vs. process
• quality of understanding vs. quality of the performance
• mechanics, organization, and facts vs. the style of student writing

Rubrics must address these different aspects of performance to ensure that the evaluation is valid and that the feedback is helpful and mindful of the trade-offs of time vs. accuracy. When constructing rubrics, consider IMPACT, WORK QUALITY, PROCESS, and CONTENT as different goals.

If you are new to rubrics, you may feel most comfortable starting with one holistic rubric or a rubric focusing on a single trait. Over time you may wish to have a set of rubrics related to the four categories above that you draw from over the course of a year. Rest assured the effort is worth it. Students will better understand what you are after, and the assessment process will actually be a key element of instruction instead of just a chore.