Using Library of Congress’s Digital Resources to Create New Forms of History Assessments

• In Event: Assessment for Educational Accountability in History and Science: Beyond Recall

Abstract

The assessment of history suffers from a poverty of imagination. American teachers are left with two choices at opposite ends of the spectrum. On the one hand are multiple choice tests, composed of items that distill facts from broader frameworks of historical meaning. On the other hand are Document Based Questions (DBQ) of the Advanced Placement Exam that ask students to read and analyze 10-12 original sources, formulate an original thesis, and compose a written argument – all in 60 minutes. The DBQ demands the orchestration of a complex repertoire of skills but it is not always clear what is being assessed—reading level, compositional fluency, historical knowledge, or the ability to put together a coherent five-paragraph essay? Surely there must be ways to tap students’ historical understanding that stop short of an hour-long assessment but which are more ambitious than multiple choice tests. Inventing such measures was the challenge we faced.

Drawing on the resources of the largest library in the world, the Library of Congress, we have worked over the past 16 months to invent new assessment prototypes, each of which is based on the interpretation of a digital resource in the Library’s vast collection. Our project was borne of the frustration we experienced during our “Reading like a Historian” intervention in five San Francisco high schools (Reisman, 2011, in press; cf. Wineburg, Martin, Monte-Sano, 2011). We found that students were ready to advance beyond multiple choice formats but not yet ready – often because they lagged several years behind in reading level – for Advanced Placement. Neither multiple choice tests nor hour-long assessments provided teachers with the quick and useful information they needed to gauge students’ on-going progress.

We have designed 24 constructed response assessments that can be completed in 5-10 minutes and scanned (should teachers need a quick sense of where their class is at) in a half-hour. Our work is rooted in the ways of historical knowing that have been identified in research on skilled practitioners and disciplinary experts (e.g., Gottlieb & Wineburg, 2011; Perfetti, Britt, & Georgi, 1995; Voss & Wiley, 2006), such as sourcing, which focuses students’ attention on a document’s author and the circumstances of a document’s creation, and contextualization, which requires readers to situate a document in time and place. We have also created assessments that tap chronological reasoning but without fixating on particular dates.

We will present findings from field-testing assessments with over 5,000 students in California and nation-wide, sharing examples of new assessment types. We will end our presentation by discussing our on-going efforts at validation.

Authors

• Sam Wineburg, Stanford University

• Joel Breakstone, Stanford University

• Mark D. Smith, Stanford University