ANN
BIANCHETTI
Diary #9
How
Should We Grade in Social Studies?
It's that time of year again. Report card time.
I have been busily averaging the grades of my students to arrive at one final letter that is supposed to reveal the competence of a student in social studies. For some teachers, this comes easy, but not for me. For the past five years of my teaching career I have struggled with what and how to grade.
At times I have been in favor of grading homework while at others I've seen it as practice and therefore, as something that shouldn't be graded. I am currently at that stage. If a student is in the process of learning something, via homework, I do not feel it is fair to then grade them on it.
In basketball, no one counts the missed shots in practice, only the ones during the game. Tests come easily to mind, as do more formal assessments such as reports, presentations, and projects. Inevitably, questions arise over these seemingly easy-to-grade assessments. How do I grade a student who fails each and every test yet can verbally tell me the answers? Is it fair to only give this student an oral test when there are others who could benefit from it too? Where do I draw the line between who can and can't take a written test? Is it fair to grade an oral test with the same standards as a written one? Am I preparing this student for high school written tests by giving oral tests?
What is a good social studies test?
In social studies I also grapple with what kinds of tests to give. Numerous social studies education theorists (Diane Ravitch, Paul Gagnon, William Bennett to name a few) support fact-based social studies education. They frequently cite infamous studies that show American high school graduates unable to place the Civil War in its proper decade or even century, or unable identify the three branches of government to save their lives.
This side of the debate revolves around content knowledge, what a student "should know by the end of eighth grade" as the New Jersey Core Curriculum Content Standards put it. I see rationales for testing and assessing content knowledge. Students need a common vocabulary to engage in critical thinking and debate. A student or citizen stripped bare of the basic nuggets of historical and governmental knowledge cannot fully participate in society.
We all remember the fun poked at George W. Bush for not knowing the leaders of five countries in a reporter's pop quiz and Al Gore being unable to identify the images of George Washington and Ben Franklin at Monticello. Would Bush and Gore been better served by content knowledge education?
Understanding or memory skills?
Content knowledge education leads to tests of memorization; questions are on the lower end of Bloom's Taxonomy (knowledge recall). I have to ask, am I really assessing student knowledge on content-based tests or am I testing a student's memory skills?
Perhaps the answer lies in how that content knowledge is imparted. When I lecture students with accompanying board notes for them to memorize and repeat back on a test, they are not learning. I believe content knowledge is best taught in the context of critical thinking skills, which brings us to the other side of the debate.
Just as many social studies theorists (Parker, Ross, and Kohlberg to name a few) come out for critical thinking or higher order knowledge as goals for social studies education. This side of the debate stresses students' ability to think (i.e. analyze, synthesize, predict in Bloom's taxonomy parlance) over their content knowledge. It doesn't matter what they think about, be it dates of the Civil War or vanilla pudding v. chocolate, as long as they use higher order thinking skills to do it. Higher order thinking skills require tests that ask students to process information, not just to recall it.
I see rationales for teaching this way, too. Do we remember the facts we learned in middle school? Could we identify the five countries of Bush's pop quiz or the founding fathers' faces in a lineup? We, as well as our students, remember habits of mind (analyzing, synthesizing, predicting) over facts (the Civil War was fought between 1861-1865).
I say it doesn't have to be either/or. I'm for teaching both with equal importance. Why can't my students develop critical habits of mind while they also memorize facts? In my experience, when I have taught content knowledge using higher order thinking skills to do so, both are enhanced and recalled. I usually tell my students, "In order for us to jump off this cliff [higher order thinking skills such as a debate] we need a common parachute [content knowledge] to guide our descent."
The Feudalism Game
An example of using higher order thinking skills to help students internalize and remember content knowledge is my "Feudalism Game." Using some resources from fellow teachers, I created this simulation for my seventh grade class during our study of medieval times.
For two weeks we create a feudal village in the classroom. Students are randomly assigned roles such as king, peasant, merchant, priest, knight, etc. to simulate the assigning of one's social class in Medieval Europe based on the randomness of whose one's parents happened to be.
Each student is given a character sheet detailing their station in life, their goals, and their power in society. They are also given a small sandwich baggie containing 'money' that fits their station (peasants get one coin, kings get many) and construction paper 'land' (peasants get no land ownership, the king owns it all).
Before we begin students are given a mini lesson on the feudal concept of land as power and the many intrigues that went on to gain land. We read some primary sources on how kings knighted lords and what that entailed in land ownership and power as well as how a merchant, through craftily price- fixing his goods, could rise to power as well.
For the next two weeks it is amazing to see the students set up shop as merchants and bargain with knights wanting to buy goods for battle (a lesson in economics as well as power), and students working together from the different families to wage 'war' against another family in order to gain his land and the favor of the king. War is waged by rolling dice, with corresponding numbers equaling consequences (for example, if the attacking knight rolled a one, it meant he imparted one wound to the one he attacked).
The students were so engaged and in charge of their learning, I became a peripheral monitor. When questions were raised about protocols, the students checked their textbooks and our primary document handouts to see how "it was really done back then." At the end of our simulation (which is always met with pleas to continue), students persistently score well on my content knowledge and critical thinking test – including students who usually do not test well. Why? They have internalized the facts of feudal life through the process of using higher order thinking skills in the simulation.
The first year I used the simulation I contrasted the test grades of the simulation class with the previous years non-simulation class and the difference was dramatic. The simulation class had much higher grades.
The learning sticks
Does it last? Yes. I see my students every year from fifth through eighth grade for social studies. Eighth graders who have participated in the feudalism simulation use the knowledge gained from it to contribute to their study of American history and civics. When discussing how the southern colonists set up their plantations, one girl who had participated in the simulation, said, "It's just like in Medieval times, when land was power. The slaves are like the serfs in feudalism. Feudalism was strong in England and many of the southern colonists came from England." This kind of comment, utilizing prior knowledge, is common among those who go through the simulation.
So, how do I grade students and what do I grade them on? I think I am finally catching on. Students in social studies need to possess and be graded on content knowledge, while also using and being graded on higher order thinking skills. Only in this fusion, in my opinion, is knowledge complete.
