History’s Tests

Chris Beneke

Testing brings out the anti-Whig in all of us it seems. The declension model was back in fashion last week as the American public was reminded of how little history it knows. The National Assessment of Educational Progress’ report on U.S. history revealed that American eighth graders have difficulty enumerating colonial advantages over the British in the Revolutionary War, fourth graders have trouble explaining Abe Lincoln’s importance, and twelfth graders often fail to grasp who was allied with who during the Korean War.

Here’s a quick summary of the academic fallout:

Several historians suggested that we un-knot our knickers. Sam Wineburg reminds us that we’ve been wringing our hands over our historical ignorance for about a century now and assures that common knowledge questions are not included in these assessments. In other words, graduating seniors probably do appreciate the significance of Harriet Tubman, Rosa Parks, the bombing of Hiroshima, and Auschwitz. They just aren’t asked about stuff that we know they know. Paul Burke echoes Wineburg’s claim that the much bemoaned results may simply reflect the test’s design, rather than the United States’ descent into barbarity. James Grossman adds that, whatever the use of the individual questions, they may not have been asked of the right students. “[I]n many states children don’t study much U.S. history until fifth grade.” “Next year,” he quips, “let’s give fourteen-year-olds a test on their driving skills.”

Very little history until the 5th grade? Linda Salvucci’s argument is that this is precisely the problem. Indiana elementary students, for example, get a grand total of twelve minutes of history instruction per week. Salvucci says that “parents … really ought to be mobilizing to demand that public officials get serious about adequately funding history education in the schools. History must not be allowed to become some optional or occasional add-on to the ‘real’ curriculum.” Her conclusion: “We need a STEM-like (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) initiative for history.”

James Livingston lays some blame for the alleged poor performance at the feet of professional historians and their affinity for anti-glorious counter narrative. Viewing the matter from the perspective of a 12th grader, he writes: “If you tell me the past doesn’t matter because it’s a record of broken promises, systematic cruelty, and failed dreams, or because it’s an irretrievable moment of eccentric deviations from a norm of appalling complacency, fine, f--- it. If I can’t use it to think about the present, why should I bother? Thanks, Doc, you convinced me that I don’t have to.”

Happily, the NEAP flare up coincided almost exactly with the publication of Historically Speaking’s roundtable on historical thinking at the K-12 level. Fritz Fischer suggests that “[w]hen it comes time to write the guidelines for how history is taught in the classroom, historical thinking [as opposed to the digestion of content] needs to become the guide.” Bruce Lesh agrees and details how he focuses student attention on a series of provocative questions and getting them engaged in interpreting primary sources. Robert Bain draws this lesson from the teaching of world history—teachers need to keep the overarching economic and social forces in mind “while attending to what their students are thinking and learning.” The two goals, he points out, are not easily reconciled. Because while you may be thinking about the geopolitical forces that propelled the European conquest of America, your students are thinking about “Columbus’s desire for personal wealth and glory” (or something along those lines . . . ). Linda Salvucci wraps up the forum with a call for nudging the public toward better history. “[W]e need to grab, define, and educate the audience,” she writes. We need to offer history that is both accessible and edifying.

Rarely is the Question Asked: Is Our Professors Teaching? Part II

Heather Cox Richardson

Randall asked a good question in his post wondering whether or not college and university professors are encouraged to improve their teaching. He has inspired me to blog about teaching issues in a more systematic way than I have before.

Today the topic that is consuming me is assessment. This is not a new obsession, either on my part or on that of the profession. We’ve talked about assessment for years. . . but what have we learned?

What, exactly, do we want our students to learn in our classes? Long ago, I figured out I should design my courses backward, identifying one key theme and several key developments that were students’ “takeaway” from a course. That seems to have worked (and I’ll write more on it in future).

But I’m still trying to figure out how to use assessments, especially exams, more intelligently that I do now. My brother, himself an educator who specializes in assessments, recently showed me this video (below), which—aside from being entertaining—tears apart the idea that traditional midterms and finals do anything useful in today’s world.

Shortly after watching the video, I happened to talk separately with two professors who use collaborative assignments and collaborative, open-book, take-home exams. They do this to emphasize that students should be learning the real-world skills of research and cooperation just as much—or more—than they learn facts. As one said,

facts in today’s world are at anyone’s fingertips . . . but people must know how to find them, and to use them intelligently. This is a skill we can teach more deliberately than we currently do.

These two people are from different universities and are in different fields, but both thought their experiment had generally worked well. One pointed out—as the video does—that the real world is not about isolation and memorization; it’s about cooperation to achieve a good result.

The other said she had had doubts about the exercise because she had worried that all the students would get an “A.” Then she realized that it would, in fact, be excellent news if all her students had mastered the skills she thought were important. When she actually gave the take-home, collaborative assignment, though, she was surprised—and chagrined—to discover the same grade spread she had always seen on traditional exams. She also saw that some of her student groups had no idea how to answer some very basic questions, and that she would have to go back over the idea that history was not just dates, but was about significance and change.

And that is maybe the most important lesson. The collaborative exam revealed that there were major concepts that a number of students simply weren’t getting. So she can now go back and reiterate them.

I’m still mulling this over, but I do think I’ll experiment with collaborative assessment techniques. Historians have some advantages doing this that teachers in other fields don’t. We can ask students to identify the significance of certain events, to write essays, and to analyze problems. With the huge amount of good—and bad—information on the web in our field, though, we could also ask students to research a topic, then judge their ability to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate sources (something that might have helped Joy Masoff when she was writing her Virginia history textbook).

As I’ve been thinking this over, a third colleague has inadvertently weighed in on it. He discovered students had cheated on a take-home exam, working together and then slightly changing each essay to make them look original. At least an assigned collaboration would eliminate the problem of unapproved collaboration!