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  1. Beyond the Bubble: New History/Social Studies Assessments for the Common Core

    Breakstone, Joel
    May 2012

    Teachers need tools and assessments that will prepare students to meet the ambitious goals laid out by the Common Core State Standards. The multiple-choice tests that dominate in history will not prepare students to analyze primary and secondary sources, cite textual evidence to support arguments, consider the influence of an authorÍs perspective, corroborate different sources, or develop written historical arguments. The Stanford History Education Group has created a series of assessments, History Assessments of Thinking, known as HATs, that address this issue and are freely available on a new website (beyondthebubble.stanford.edu).

  2. Formative Assessment Using Library of Congress Documents

    Breakstone, Joel
    September 2015

    In searching for alternatives to multiple choice tests and DBQs, we were inspired by the common practice of “do-nows” (also known as “bell work”) in which teachers give students a brief task at the beginning of class to prepare them for the day’s lesson. Could these minutes at the start of class be used for formative assessment? With support from the Library of Congress, we set out to create tasks that would give social studies teachers new options. Our exercises are built around primary sources from the Library’s extensive collection. Each exercise assesses core skills of historical thinking and provides teachers with quick feedback about student understanding. All of our tasks, which we call History Assessments of Thinking (HATs), can be completed in less than ten minutes, some in less than five. They require students to evaluate a source and to write a few sentences to explain their reasoning about it. Even short answers, we have learned, tell us a great deal about student thinking.

  3. Students’ Civic Online Reasoning: A National Portrait

    Breakstone, Joel
    April 7, 2021

    Are today’s students able to discern quality information from sham online? In the largest investigation of its kind, we administered an assessment to 3,446 high school students. Equipped with a live Internet connection, students responded to six constructed-response tasks. Students struggled on all of them. Asked to investigate a site claiming to “disseminate factual reports” on climate science, 96% never learned about the organization’s ties to the fossil fuel industry. Two-thirds were unable to distinguish news stories from ads on a popular website’s homepage. Over half believed that an anonymously posted Facebook video, shot in Russia, provided “strong evidence” of U.S. voter fraud. Instead of investigating the organization or group behind a site, students were often duped by weak signs of credibility: a website’s “look”, its top-level domain, the content on its About page, and the sheer quantity of information it provided. The study’s sample reflected the demographic profile of high school students in the United States, and a multilevel regression model explored whether scores varied by student characteristics. Findings revealed differences in student abilities by grade level, self-reported grades, locality, socioeconomic status, race, maternal education, and free/reduced price lunch status. Taken together, these findings reveal an urgent need to prepare students to thrive in a world in which information flows ceaselessly across their screens.

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