Assessment and Evaluation in Social Studies Classrooms: A Question of Balance

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for example, students are asked about an event or an idea using a newspaper story format, including an appropriate headline. Other essays present a quotation or provocative proposition and ask students to make an argument based on evidence to support or refute the validity of the statement.

Finally we can direct students to respond in structured ways using action verbs connected to Bloom’s Taxonomy of Cognitive Objectives (i.e., describe, explain, analyze, synthesize, and evaluate).¹⁷ This works if students know the meaning of the verbs and see examples of their use in sample responses.

Document-based questions
As outlined above, Alberta and most other provinces have identified procedural understanding as a key goal for social studies education. In other words, students are supposed to be able to use the concepts and procedures of the disciplines involved in social studies such as history, geography, and economics. It is not enough to know what the causes of World War I are; students should also understand something of the way historians arrived at those causes, including what evidence they considered and how they made sense of that evidence. In teaching history in primary grades, curricula across the country recommend the use of primary sources: pictures, artifacts, maps, and written and oral accounts. We have been less successful in using these in assessment. In North America, document-based questions (DBQS) used to be considered appropriate only for senior high students in International Baccalaureate or Advanced Placement programs, though the British have been using “sources” for decades. Now we can use them to bring more authenticity to instruction and assessment. The Begbie Contest in British Columbia has used document-based questions since 1994 for high-school students.¹⁸ Some jurisdictions have used them in elementary grades as well. These questions are not designed to test student’s recall of information but rather their abilities to critically use sources as the basis for constructing historical accounts.

Performance Asessment
Performance assessment is considered new although it is as old as assessment itself. Unlike selected response, the assessor does not count correct responses in order to render a judgement. Instead she or he collects data on the process or makes a judgement about the quality of the final product as students actually do something. In some jurisdictions performance tasks serve as end-of-unit assessments or culminating activities instead of the traditional quiz or project. Performance assessment tasks are not add-ons, fillers, or breaks for the teacher, but opportunities to combine instruction with assessment. There are many examples of social studies performance tasks, such as the following:¹⁹

• Three prominent international conflicts are drawn from newspapers. Students select one of the three, write a summary of the conflict, and discuss the influence of climate, resources, and location on the conflict. As well, the students sketch from memory a map of the region of the world showing national boundaries, capitals, and salient landforms. A legend and compass rose are included.
• Students identify, then compare and contrast, a diverse set of examples of societies organized under, or attempting to organize under, the democratic ideal, with examples drawn from three continents.
• Students analyze a transcribed excerpt of a discussion of a recurring public issue, distinguishing among factual, definitional, and ethical issues, and judging the quality of each participant’s contribution.
• The federal deficit is about $500 billion. Students translate this number into a form the average reader of the local paper can understand.

According to Bower, Lobdell, and Swenson, culminating performance activities or projects:²⁰

• are central to the unit and its big question
• are known to students in advance

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