Good news for history teachers: the Stanford History Education Group has developed history assessments that use documents and historical resources to ask thinking questions, not bubble questions.
In the 1990s, history education was a priority. California and other states created history frameworks for K-12, and it appeared that history would get the time, attention and resources it needed.
But that moment of high possibility came to an end with the passage of No Child Left Behind. History teachers have been in a quandary ever since, as they saw their subject marginalized and reduced to an afterthought.
Reading and math are tested. History is not tested. To some administrators, that means that history doesn’t matter because it doesn’t count. They pour scarce resources into the only subjects that count: reading and math.
Some history teachers react by demanding history tests. They figure that if history is tested, it will gain stature. You can see the headlines now: 47% don’t know this, 24% don’t know that.
Others worry that history will be dumbed down by the bubble tests that put a premium on simple answers with no ambiguity.
It is a dilemma: how to stay alive without sacrificing the soul of the study, the thinking and debating and uncertainty that are inherent in history. Consider a field that tries to understand events and relies on historians who likely were not alive when they happened or on unreliable eyewitness accounts.
How do young people make sense of conflicting accounts? How can they learn that interpretations change over time? How can they learn to deal with uncertainty and incoherence?
The Stanford History Education Group has created a website for history teachers. It could be a model for other subjects.
Check it out: http://beyondthebubble.stanford.edu/
This is very good news for students, teachers, and the survival of historical thinking.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
My district, in its infinite wisdom, has come up with just such a bubble sheet test for history and geography. The other teachers and I are supposed to administer two computer-based tests a year. There are fifty multiple choice questions that we are supposed to give in one 45 minute period. The window for the second test is two days after we return from Spring Break and only ONE WEEK into the fourth term. My school, which is a moderate-poverty school with a relatively high student turnover rate. We have fewer computer labs than some of the wealthier schools in the district. Because all of the other required tests are also computer-based, our test has to be given earlier than the others.
The district has given us no real rationales for these tests. I have asked several times, and have been told that these tests will “greatly inform (my) teaching” and will be used to “compare” various district schools. I have asked about the cost of these tests and the loss of instructional time. I have been told that, if you add up all of the periods of testing, that it only comes to two full days of testing. There are over two weeks of testing, spread out a period at a time, but I guess is does add up to two full days. That’s not really the point, of course.
I have spent months trying to convince the district that these tests are not only unnecessary but time consuming and expensive, which are the only arguments that work with the district. I have also tried to tell them the damage it will do to the students and my concerns that I will be graded by my students’ scores. I have been told that, since it is not high stakes, that is no concern. The tests are not YET high stakes, but I feel that it is only a matter of time before I am graded by these tests.
I spend a lot of time working with my students to teach them to be informed, knowledgeable citizens. The entire 8th grade goes each year to the state capitol during the legislative session, where they have researched and tracked bills and talk to legislators and watch voting take place. If my salary and career are based on test scores, those sorts of activities will stop, because I know that there will be, at most, one question about lawmaking, and I will have to cover more “important” things. One of the main reasons for public education is to produce educated citizens. The test, in my opinion, does not support that essential goal.
The goal of the testing is not to inform your practice but to evaluate YOU
There are ten assessments–fewer would be considered “power standards.”
Surely there must be a more extensive trove of DBQs!
To their credit, they SHEG appears to resist the temptation to substitute their thoughts for those in primary sources written by founding fathers. That’s progress over UCLA’s history in schools project that drew the wrath of Lynne Cheney: “”Mr. Nash … told Reuters a few days ago that he was against hero-driven history. I think our kids need heroes.”
History used to be written by the victors. Will it now be written by the grant winners? How would that advance the “unfinished work” of the “great task remaining before us?”
Funny, I’d never allow my child to take an “assessment”. Only a test. I’d prefer the schools stop trying to change the values and attitudes and focus on academic excellence. An assessment is an attempt to change their beliefs.
Enough of the social engineering and get back to teaching academic content.
Mom . . . try and keep up here: When the tax assessor comes to your house, she is not trying to “change” anything about your house. She is very simply taking a measure of the worth of your house. When a tragedy happens and the news reporter says that officials are trying to assess the damage, he does not mean that they are changing anything about the situation, they are just taking a measurement of what has happened. When your kid’s teacher gives a test, they are just trying to measure what your kid knows. Get the pattern? Assess = measure. Tests measure. Therefore, in the education profession, when we speak of the variety of things that could constitute a measurement of student learning (tests, quizzes, interviews, portfolio reviews, presentations, etc.), we use the very appropriate word “assessment.”
Another thing: You have used the phrase “academic content” repeatedly in your comments on this blog and if you are going to take up space here, I think you owe it to the rest of us to define what you are talking about. And how, pray tell, should we determine if we have adequately taught the “academic content”, whatever it is, without assessing?
test or is that assessment or a measure of getting this posted
@Duane Swacker,
Huh?
And another thing, MOM: An assessment is not “an attempt to change their beliefs.” Teaching is. That is exactly what teaching is. One example (out of thousands real teachers could supply): almost all of my physics students come into my classroom with the firm belief that objects that are moving at a constant speed have a net force acting on them. It is my job to change that belief. If I cannot do that, I may as well not even show up.
And since I’m on the subject and since I know memorizing is one of your favorite hobby horses, can you guess what will be almost completely ineffective in changing that belief? Making them memorize “F = ma”, which is the actual truth about what force is on moving objects. While I can train most kids to use that equation to solve contrived textbook problems about moving objects, merely memorizing will do nothing to change the beliefs of nearly all kids. That is backed up by some of the most solid research in all of education.
Some history teachers react by demanding history tests. They figure that if history is tested, it will gain stature. You can see the headlines now: 47% don’t know this, 24% don’t know that.
High school teachers in Ohio complain that without tests in earlier grades, students are unprepared for high school social studies courses. We’ve not had a problem with the (speculative) headlines–details at that level aren’t released (AFAIK).
I appreciate the history degree my very conservative husband has. It gave him a belief in the subjectivity of the historical record and in evolving interpretations of the past. I am less patient than he is with politics; he has more perspective.
I have a history degree, and I see a rising tide of greed and social wreckage
But doesn’t that tide lift all boats? And then from the heights of the high tide the benefits trickle down on all?
Oh, it doesn’t and it hasn’t in the last 30 years of ever increasing wealth and income disparity. Well let’s keep on trying anyway, eh!!
(turn off snarkometer)
Thank you Diane for your very on-target entry on the Stanford assessments and the treatment of SS over the past decade-plus. We need to hear that voice from many sources, as you and I have stated in our email exchange.