The updated New York State Regents examination in United States History and Government, part II, is a short essay task designed to measure students’ ability to work with historic documents. It is a mature version of the “CRQ” found on the tenth grade Global Regents. Students are called upon to understand text, engage it with historical context, and assess a text’s reliability.
In document set 1, students describe the historical context surrounding two documents and identify and explain the relationship between the events and/or ideas found in those documents (Cause/Effect or Similarity/Difference or Turning Point).
Turning point is always the most challenging for students, mainly because it demands a strong knowledge of historical context which only the higher performing students usually possess. In stating similarities and differences, it is important to stress to students that this should be a substantial feature of the two texts, not trivial. For example, some students may respond something like this: “Document one is a cartoon and document two is a newspaper report”. This is trivial and should be discouraged. For cause and effect analyses, remind students that some events may lie outside the documents at hand, so they may need to rely on their historical knowledge.
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Document set 2 asks students to describe the historical context surrounding two documents and (for one identified document) analyze and explain how audience, or purpose, or bias, or point of view affects the document’s use as a reliable source of evidence.
A good strategy for ensuring students possess the skills to address this task is to be certain to assign one every month or so throughout the year, followed by a debriefing where the class can study their classmates’ work (anonymously) and develop strategies for improvement.
Weaker readers are particularly disadvantaged in this task, although since the test items are field tested before administration it is likely the field testing will mitigate some issues with the difficulty of reading some primary source texts. Students can be taught compensatory reading strategies to help deal with difficult texts.
As always, the challenge is to ensure that students have learned a strong body of historical context. That is, the best marks are reserved for those who actually recall the history and who can analyze it (cause-effect, turning point, etc.) This is best achieved by regularly administering quizzes on historical knowledge. I like to give students time in class to study for these. The apps here at Innovation Assessments are especially suited to that end. A lot of social studies assignments can tend to be just look-it-up and transfer kinds of exercises without real demands on students to remember. This is an easy instruction error to remedy.
Teaching factors affecting the reliability of sources is another matter. This takes a great deal of time and practice and, I would argue, is of upmost importance for a person’s education in this day and age. Students, for the most part, do not intuitively analyze and explain how audience, or purpose, or bias, or point of view affects a document’s use as a reliable source of evidence. They tend to take what we give them on face value. It is important to teach students to think critically and approach all historic documents with a healthy skepticism.
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I think teaching reliability should begin young, down in middle school. Engaging students with documents that have very vague reliability weights is a good practice. In a debriefing after the task, it is useful to anonymously display some student reliability evaluations for all to see and to discuss. It is important to do this regularly, starting off right at the start of the school year. There are really no stock phrases that students can learn by rote for this, given the variety of context and source material. I had the benefit of working in a small school where I had the same students grades seven through ten or eleven, so I could implement reliability assessments early in my program. In larger school districts, it would be good to consider a commitment to reliability factor training from an early age. I assigned one longer primary source to analyze each topic (so about once a month). This short essay included an extended analysis of reliability in a conclusion paragraph. The training paid off and when my eleventh graders were preparing for the Regents in US History and Government, they had little difficulty with reliability factors.
A good piece of advice on this is to assign students to do this every month in grade eleven. I suggest assigning it as a test each time. Coach students on the historical context they have to memorize in advance. Lots of teachers assign these for homework, but this entirely misses the point of such training. Student independent work practices are highly efficient in applying the minimal effort to a task, including copying their colleagues’ work or copy-pasting from a source. If they are not doing these without notes, they’re not really practicing.
If you are afraid to assign your students this as a test because they are not likely to do well at first and don’t want to bother their GPA, I recommend using standardized scoring. You can use the z-score calculator here at Innovation Assessments. Use 78 as your standard mean and 14.8 as your standardized standard deviation. Read more about standardized scoring here and where I got those figures. The beauty of this system is you can apply this to their grades every month and as the class improves, as the class average approaches the standardized mean (78 in this case), then the algorithm affects their scores less and less.
Once you have scored their papers, select out some problem responses for class discussion in a debriefing. Keeping the responses anonymous, review how to improve the answers next time.
The short essay is 14% of the Regents score, so for passing the text it’s a good practice. But I would suggest that this kind of work as a regular lesson is extremely valuable as an educational tool. Studying primary sources rightly should take center stage in our social studies lessons. It is not just teaching to the test to do this. It is developing a critical thinking skill set and insisting on recall of historical context that are the values here. Remember, that the highest valued performance is that which is based on a substantial recall of historical context!