Are you looking for an innovative and engaging essay prompt to enrich your American history curriculum? Look no further! Our unique essay prompt invites students to delve into key moments and themes in U.S. history through the analysis of primary source documents. Designed for educators teaching U.S. history at grade 11, this prompt provides a stimulating opportunity for students to explore, analyze, and interpret primary sources while honing their historical inquiry and critical thinking skills.
Our essay prompt challenges students to explore the constitutional and civic issue of civil rights and racial equality in early American history. Through the analysis of four carefully selected primary source documents, students will:
Document 1: Excerpt from a contract recording the sale of land along the Hudson River from Mahican Indians to Kiliaen van Rensselaer, 1630.
Document 2: Image of Paul Revere’s drawing of the Boston Massacre.
Document 3: Excerpt from a confidential letter, Jefferson’s message to Congress on the Expedition West.
Document 4: Bartolomé de las Casas — Excerpts from The Very Brief Relation of the Devastation of the Indies.
Document 5: Jefferson’s “original Rough draught” of the Declaration of Independence, 1776.
Document 6: A traveler describes life along the Erie Canal, 1829.
Engage Students in Active Learning: This essay prompt is designed to engage students in active learning experiences that foster historical inquiry, critical analysis, and historical literacy. By examining primary source documents, students will gain a deeper understanding of the complexities, contradictions, and enduring struggles that have shaped America’s constitutional and civic landscape.
Passcodes for Online Versions in my virtual classroom at Innovation Website
Give your students the passcodes to access online auto-corrected versions of the lessons in this unit. If you are a subscriber toInnovation, you can use the passcodes to import the activities into your own account and test banks. You can see and save student work that way. If not, just have your students send you a screenshot of their score on completing the task.
Enhance Classroom Instruction: Integrate this essay prompt into your history curriculum to:
Stimulate student interest and curiosity in key moments and themes in American history.
Encourage students to analyze and interpret primary sources, strengthening their analytical and research skills.
Foster meaningful class discussions and debates on issues of civil rights, racial equality, and social justice.
Provide students with opportunities to develop their written communication skills through the composition of well-reasoned and evidence-based essays.
Unlock the Past with Teachers Pay Teachers: Access our engaging essay prompt today on Teachers Pay Teachers. Whether you’re a history teacher seeking to inspire critical thinking and historical inquiry or a homeschooling parent looking for thought-provoking curriculum materials, our essay prompt offers a valuable tool for bringing American history to life in your classroom or homeschool environment.
Don’t miss out on this opportunity to empower your students to become active participants in the study of history. Visit our store on Teachers Pay Teachers to download our essay prompt and ignite a passion for historical inquiry and critical thinking in your students today!
Embark on a captivating journey through French heritage with our immersive culture unit tailored for French 3 students and beyond. Rooted in a pedagogical approach that emphasizes cultural exploration, this comprehensive package offers an in-depth exploration of France’s rich architectural and intangible heritage. Crafted with both in-person and remote learning in mind, our adaptable materials provide educators with the flexibility to seamlessly integrate cultural studies into their curriculum, whether in print or online.
Dive into the essence of French patrimoine with our three meticulously designed PowerPoint presentations, totaling 31 slides, covering architectural marvels and intangible cultural artifacts. Enhance vocabulary acquisition with our tier 2 word list, thoughtfully curated to facilitate reading comprehension and linguistic fluency. Immerse yourself in the captivating world of French heritage through four engaging readings complemented by comprehension questions, as well as thought-provoking inquiries tailored for six enlightening videos. Additionally, ignite students’ creativity and critical thinking with two composition assignments designed to deepen their understanding and appreciation of French cultural heritage. Plus, gain exclusive access to our virtual classroom at Innovation, where students can further explore and engage with the rich tapestry of French patrimoine. Elevate your French language curriculum and inspire a deeper connection to French culture with our dynamic and comprehensive French Heritage “Patrimoine” Unit.
Short Essay Prompts, New York State Regents US History and Government
Unlocking America’s Past: An Exploration of Historical Documents
Join us on a journey through America’s dynamic history with our two groundbreaking products designed to enhance historical document analysis skills and deepen understanding of pivotal periods in American history.
Delve into the transformative era of 19th-century America with our meticulously curated collection of primary sources. Engage in critical analysis as you explore letters from pioneering women activists like Elizabeth Cady Stanton, alongside Senate debates on the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Our comprehensive set includes scoring rubrics, sample student essays, and exclusive access to video lessons with embedded auto-corrected questions. Uncover the voices of change and gain insights into the struggles for equality and justice that shaped the nation.
Documents:
Elizabeth Cady Stanton to Susan B. Anthony
Excerpt from the Senate Debate on the Kansas-Nebraska Act, 1854
Excerpt from the Virginia Resolution, 1798
William Lloyd Garrison Introduces The Liberator, 1831
Explore the complexities of post-Civil War America with our comprehensive resource focusing on Reconstruction policies and the rise of Jim Crow laws. Analyze primary sources such as the Semi-annual report on schools for freedom, and a newspaper article from the Richmond planet. Gain a deeper understanding of the socio-political landscape through documents like Charles Sumner’s address on the power struggle between the President and Congress, and an excerpt from the Mississippi Black Code. With scoring rubrics, sample student essays, and video lessons, uncover the nuances of America’s evolution during this transformative period.
Documents:
Semi-annual report on schools for freedom, 1866
Newspaper Article in the Richmond planet, 15 September 1900, Page 8
“One Man Power vs. Congress” address, Charles Sumner (Mass.), Boston 2 October 1866
Excerpt, Mississippi Black Code (1865)
Immerse yourself in America’s past and unlock the complexities of its history with our engaging and comprehensive educational resources. Visit our blog to learn more about our teaching methods and how these products can elevate your classroom experience.
I submit two new “Enduring Issue” essay prompt modeled on the New Regents examinations in New York State. This Enduring Issue Essay presents the students with five documents, from which they select three to support some enduring issue they see through history.
Both products include access to video lessons with embedded questions here at Innovation so your students can review the historical context before writing their analysis.
When empires start to crumble, the “group feeling” that Ibn Khaldun noted as the binding force of society begins to unravel. In the face of the stress of migrations, invasions, internal political polarization, economic distress there comes a disintegration of morals and customs of courtesy. This does not go unnoticed by everyone. In Of Decadence and Empire’s Fall, students explore primary sources from the Roman Empire and the Han Dynasty. They may see the warnings from the wise about a decline in moral behavior. They may piece together similar contributing factors to the disintegration of a political unit.
Document excerpts included in this essay prompt:
Excerpt, The Conspiracy of Catiline, Gaius Sallustius Crispus, 63 BCE
Excerpt, Sima Qian and Laissez-Faire:Manifestations of a “Discordant and Degenerate Age”
Excerpt, St. Jerome, “Letter 127: To Principia”, 412CE
Excerpt, A Translation of the Chronicle on the ‘Western Regions’ from the Hou Hanshu, the dynastic history of the Han dynasty
Painting, The Course of Empire: Destruction (1836) by Thomas Cole
Those of us who have taught high school for decades are well acquainted with adolescent rebelliousness. Frankly, I respect it, I expect it, and I wonder about the young person who is not a little instinctively resistant. Be that said, I know that I am usually right anyway. : )
When the proportion of young in the population gets high, such as in Iran in the late ’70s and the US when the Baby Boomers came to late teens, you can bet there will be social upheaval! In “On Students in Revolt”, students in Global Studies 10 (New York State curriculum) will examine primary sources related to times in history when students were the impetus for change. These are not generally positive, which I hope does not reveal a middle aged bias on my part.
Document excerpts included in this essay prompt:
Report by Louis P. Lochner, Head of the Berlin Bureau of the Associated Press (10 May 1933)
Mr. Dai, a sociologist in Beijing, attended Tsinghua University High School, where the first Red Guard groups were formed.
On the Hostages’ Release, AFP Press Release, 14 January 1980
Innovation has developed some very effective applications for teaching world languages remotely or in a classroom with a student 1:1 laptop configuration. I have been teaching French remotely for a few months now and have had the opportunity to really take these apps out for a rigorous test drive and to make some great tweaks under the hood!
Regents Global 9 Enduring Issue Essay Prompt: Belief Systems
This particular enduring theme essay began as an exploration of the idea that spiritual leaders in history often had “wilderness experiences” as part of their own religious awakening. This is the best-selling enduring issue essay prompt product from our store at TeacherPayTeachers that I would like to showcase today.
The enduring issue essay is a task in the curriculum and state testing in New York State for Global History and Geography. Students examine a set of documents and compose an essay making the case for an enduring historical issue that they observe, combining documents and their knowledge of the historical context.
Documents 1-4 of this prompt are selections from religious texts giving evidence for the following: Jesus’ forty days in the desert and subsequent temptation, Buddha’s temptation by Mara in the forest, Muhammad’s visits to the cave where he receives the revelation from the angel Jibreel, Joseph Smith’s walk in the 1832 New York woods to meet Jesus. Document 5 is a map of Abraham’s journey from the Torah.
Strictly speaking, the Regents enduring essay task will be something a bit different from this. However, the theme works nicely in a unit on the world’s belief systems.
When I developed this task, I did have one common theme in mind to start, however students may see others, which I illustrate in the sample student essays included in the product.
This enormous project also includes a modified version of the readings for special education purposes as well as a complete collection of video lessons on belief systems. These video lessons include embedded, auto-corrected questions to guide practice.
I invite the reader to peruse our store and explore the other thought-provoking document-based essay prompts we offer! Support great scholarship with quality materials!
InnovationAssessments.com brings to mind a testing service. And so it once was!
Was…
But the pandemic spurred its growth toward the full online teaching platform that it is today!
Not to disparage our educational testing apps. This platform started out twenty-odd years ago as a test generator for multiple-choice tests. The test generators, test question bank management apps, secure online testing, and algorithmic AI-assisted scoring of short answer tests and summaries makes it a powerful tool in your teacher’s toolbox.
But…
While we kept the name (Do you realize how hard it is to rebrand a website?), we are more than our name! I invite the reader to explore the collection of apps that makes this a top-notch teaching platform.
For starters, Innovation evolved under the demands of real teachers and students in real classrooms. As my colleagues and students shared suggestions for apps and upgrades over a decade, I modified and adapted the software. My coding students were assigned to try to hack it; I built defenses. My teacher colleagues had lots of ideas for ensuring assessments integrity. We collaborated to built something reliable and intuitive to use.
It is difficult to compose a promo for Innovation because by the time we list all the features, we have lost the attention of the reader.
Lesson Planning
The first thing that I did not like about Google Classroom was how clumsy it was to communicate assignments to kids. I don’t like the comment stream approach. And what about students who are ahead and want to see what tomorrow holds? The planning app at Innovation is the first thing students see when they navigate to their course playlist. They see this week and all the assignments. They can jump to them from the planner or scroll down the playlist. There is a custom note option just for today’s lesson.
Curating Resources
It is important to me to be able to effectively curate my resources; my links to assignments on and off Innovation. I want to be able to hide things until the time is right, lock tests with a key code, schedule the visibility of tasks to the best moment, and so forth. Innovation possesses all of these features and more for efficient curating of class online resources. Link to Google docs and website of any kind, manage who has access and when, hide unit plans for next school year.
But it is also easy if you curate your resources elsewhere!
Many subscribers to Innovation curate their links at Google Classroom or other platforms. Well, most use Google Classroom… But that’s okay! Innovation is a verified app on the Google system. You can embed a link to your Innovation task on Google classroom and after a quick authentication app, students are engaged in the day’s lesson.
Proctor
The proctor at Innovation is an algorithmic AI that monitors and reports on student activity. My colleagues and I wanted to know whether students were really watching our video assignments or whether they were pasting in text in some places; we wanted to know how long it took students to do a task and when they logged in and from where. Proctor AI gives detailed information about what students are doing online in your 21st century learning space.
Study Apps
The Tutor app and the flashcard system are perfect for drilling terms and facts.
The algorithmic AI coach advises students on short answer, summaries, and outlines based on a corpus of models on which they were trained.
Modifications are easily made to drills to accommodate special needs.
Innovation has what your students need to study and what teachers need to scaffold their objectives to individual needs.
The Etude
The Etude is our favorite app. Teachers embed a lesson in video, PDF, and/or audio format and include guiding questions. There is note-taking space for students. The Etude is the perfect tool to curate deliverables online in 1:1 laptop classrooms or in remote teaching situations.
Merit Badges
Manage merit badges to chart progress. Invent your own or import ours. As students earn new skills, automated badge awards provide visual evidence of progress.
Ventura!
Students love playing this Jeopardy-like game. It is easy for teachers to generate games from their test question banks. Suitable for in-person or remote learning situations, the Ventura game is a hit with students.
Why not try it out!
Look, I know we’re a small startup company, unknown and not really able to compete with Google, Scoology, and the big names.
In mid-May 2020, we were finishing up 2 months of remote learning during the pandemic. I conducted a study to find out what I could learn from the students who were very successful learning online remotely.
Twenty-one respondents to a survey asking successful online learners to report on the “secrets” of their success collectively present a profile of the student who will likely do well in asynchronous distance learning conditions. These students are very self-directed, seldom needing much parent intervention or supervision. Most like working online because there are fewer distractions than in school and they can work on their own schedules and at their own pace. These students have a special place set aside for doing school work and mostly do their school work in one sitting rather than sporadically through the day. These students are not necessarily very academic-oriented in temperament and may not even prefer online learning because they miss their friends and teachers. When asked to advise their peers, common suggestions include ideas like planning out the working and break or recreation time, keeping checklists, and self-motivation strategies.
Besides answering my questionnaire, 14 of 21 respondents accepted my invitation to make suggestions for their peers about their secrets for online success. Their comments are as follows:
I think that it easier to get all of your work done during the same time because then that way you can have the whole afternoon to do whatever you want.
As the Nike logo says “Just Do It”! I try not to put stuff off, however I wish it will be over soon so we can have summer and do other productive things with my family.
i have a system that i follow and i check all classes my email old emails at least 19 times a day
I try to give myself some time in the morning to wake up and have some time to myself, like an hour, then I start my day and work until lunch most times which I then take another hour or two to rest, finally I work until I am finished with little breaks and end most of the time right before dinner. I would say just try to get it done early then you could look forward tp having the rest of the day and if you get ahead then at the end of the week you could possibly have friday off, like I do. Also, just try and not get distracted and if you need to tell your siblings/parents/guardians you need quiet, my mom has learned that she can’t talk to me when I am doing school.
Something that motivates me is when I can take a 5-10 minute break between each subject. I use my RC car for this. While it is charging (it usually takes 45 minutes to charge) I do some work, and when it is done (it has a 10 minute run time) I go out and drive it.
I find that it helps to have a list of what I have to do and when they are due. This helps me to prioritize and not stress out as much about my work. I also tend to do my work in the morning. This way I have time to do my work and I can get it all done early. If I forget about an assignment, this also allows me to do it before it is due.
i just think that after i do all my work i can go out an do anything i want the rest of the day so i use that to motivate me
having parental involvement keeps me on task or i wouldn’t stay on task. My parents also checking power school regularly. I do struggle because i’m not getting as much assistance as i would during school.
Make sure to hunker down and just do your schoolwork. try to follow pretty much the same schedule every day and not get into a mindset of “I have all day to finish”, because chances are you’re just gonna keep on putting it off.
Well about the distractions. The main distraction I have at home and not school is food. Now that I am at home there are lots of food breaks.
I think a schedule is really important. Not only does it limit the amount of distractions in the day, but allows you to get through your work without missing anything or falling behind. I was home schooled before I came hear, and sometimes it’s nice to set apart time where you can watch a show or a play a game or something, that way you don’t feel as inclined to take a break in the middle of your work. That’s all the advice I got! 🙂
‘m getting better grades doing the online learning, but I don’t really like it because I’m not getting the same interactions with teachers and friends that I can get when I’m physically in school.
For me, I do a few hours of school work in the morning and then a few hours of it in the afternoon. I always take about an hour or two for a break in between those times. That break is very nice, and relaxing. I either go for a walk, or try to do another activity that is not school related. I find if I do not take that break, I get too overwhelmed. Questions 2 and 3: My parents check up on me, to see how I am doing. But they do not watch over me. Also, my parents trust that I am getting all the school work in on time, so they do not enforce too many rules, because I stay on top of it myself.
Fully functional and reliable automated “AI” grading of essays is a long way off yet and well beyond the computing capability available in typical secondary school classrooms. However, useful steps in that direction are well within reach, particularly for working within the domain of limited vocabulary and composition skills that constitute the typical proficiency level of students in grades six through twelve. High school social studies teachers in New York State assess student essays using a grading rubric provided by the State Education Department. One dimension of this rubric is to assess the relative degree of “analytic writing” versus descriptive. Students whose essays are more analytical than descriptive have a work of greater value. The artificially intelligent grading program at InnovationAssessments.com estimates the grade of a student writing sample by comparing it to a number of models in a corpus of full credit samples. With a view to developing an algorithm that better imitates human raters, this paper outlines the data and methods underlying an algorithm that yields an assessment of the “richness of analysis” of a student writing sample.
Measuring “Richness” of Analysis in Secondary Student Writing Samples
The New York State generic scoring rubrics for high school social studies Regents exams, both for thematic and document-based essay1, value student expository work where the piece “[i]s more analytical than descriptive (analyzes, evaluates, and/or creates* information)” (Abrams, 2004). A footnote in the Generic Grading Rubric states: “The term create as used by Anderson/Krathwohl, et al. in their 2001 revision of Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives refers to the highest level of the cognitive domain. This usage of create is similar to Bloom’s use of the term synthesis. Creating implies an insightful reorganization of information into a new pattern or whole. While a level 5 paper will contain analysis and/or evaluation of information, a very strong paper may also include examples of creating information as defined by Anderson and Krathwohl.”
Anderson and Krathwohl (2002), in their revision of Bloom’s Taxonomy, define analysis thus:
4.0 Analyze – Breaking material into its constituent parts and detecting how the parts relate to one another and to an overall structure or purpose. 4.1 Differentiating 4.2 Organizing 4.3 Attributing
One of the ways that students analyze is to express cause and effect relationships (Anderson and Krathwohl’s “4.3 Attributing”). It is possible using natural language processing techniques to identify and examine cause and effect relationships in writing samples using lexical and syntactic indicators. Taking a cue from the New York State rubric, one could judge that a student writing sample is more “richly analytical” if it “spends” more words on cause and effect proportionate to the entire body of words written.
Identifying and Extracting Cause and Effect Relationships using Natural Language Processing
With regard to identifying cause-effect relationships in natural language, Asghar (2016, p. 2) notes that “[t]he existing literature on causal relation extraction falls into two broad categories: 1) approaches that employ linguistic, syntactic and semantic pattern matching only, and 2) techniques based on statistical methods and machine learning.” The former method was selected for this task because the domain is limited to secondary level student writing samples and they use a limited variety of writing structures. Previous work studying this issue yielded better results in domain-specific contexts (Asghar, 2016) and tagging sentences containing cause-effect relationships in this context should be within reach to a high degree of accuracy.
The software is written in Perl. The following process is applied to the student writing sample for analysis:
The text is “scrubbed” of extra consecutive spaces, HTML tags, and characters outside the normal alphanumeric ASCII range.
The Flesch-Kincaid text complexity measure is calculated.
The text is “lemmatized”, meaning words that have many variations are reduced to a root form (i.e., “is, am, are, were, was” etc. are all turned to “be”; “cause, caused, causing” etc. are all turned to “cause.”)
The text is “synonymized”, meaning words are changed to a single common synonym. The text is separated into an array of sentences and all words are tagged by their part of speech.
A variety of lexical and syntactic indicators of cause-effect are used in pattern matching to identify and extract sentences which include a cause-effect relationship into an array.
The resulting array of cause-effect relationship sentences are converted into a “bag of words2” without punctuation. Stop words are removed. All words are “stemmed”, meaning variations on spelling are removed.
Finally, both the original text and the array of cause-effect relationships are reduced further to a bag of unique words.
At this point, the computer program compares the bags of words. The resulting percentage is the proportion of unique words spent on cause-effect out of the total number of unique words. Recall that these are “bags of words” which have been lemmatized, synonymized, stemmed, and from which stop words have been removed.
Limitations of this Method
There are ways to express cause-effect relationships in English without using lexical indicators such as “because”, “thus”, “as”, etc. For example, one could express cause and effect this way: It was raining very heavily. We put on the windshield wipers and we drove slowly.
“Putting on the wipers” and “driving slowly” are caused by the heavy rain. There are no semantic or lexical indicators that signal this. There are many challenges dealing with “explicit and implicit causal relations based on syntactic-structure-based causal patterns” (Paramita, 2016). This algorithm does not attempt to identify this kind of expression of cause-effect. Prior research in this area has shown limited promise to date (Mirza, 2016, p. 70).
Cause-effect is only one way to analyze. Differentiating (categorizing) and organizing (prioritizing, setting up a hierarchy) should also be addressed in future versions of this software. A student could compose a “richly” analytical piece without using cause-effect, although in this writer’s experience cause-effect is the most common expression in writing of people in this age group.
Analyzing a Corpus of Student Work
The New York State Education Department provides anchor papers for the Regents exams so that raters can have models of each possible essay score on a scale of one to five. Anchor papers are written by actual students during the field testing phase of the examination creation process. Sixty such anchor papers were selected for use in this study from collections of thematic and document-based essays available online at the New York State Education Department website archive (https://www.nysedregents.org/GlobalHistoryGeography/). Thirty came from papers identified as scoring level five and thirty scoring level two. Essays scoring five are exemplary and rare. Papers scoring two are “passing” and represent the most common score. Essays are provided online in PDF format. Each one was transformed to plain text using GoogleDrive’s OCR feature. Newline characters were removed as was any text not composed by a student (such as header information). This constitutes the corpus.
The computer program analyzed each sample and returned the following statistics: number of cause-effect sentences found in the sample, the count of unique words “spent” on cause-effect relationships in the whole text, the count of unique words in the entire text, the percentage of unique words spent on cause-effect, the seconds it took to process, text complexity as measured by the Flesch-Kincaid readability formula, and finally a figure that is termed the “analysis score” and is intended to be a measure of “richness” in analysis in the writing sample.
An interesting and somewhat surprising finding came in comparing the corpus of level two essays to those scoring a level five. There was no real difference in the percentage of unique words students writing at these levels spent “doing” analysis of cause-effect. The mean percent of words spent on cause-effect relative to the unique words in the entire text was 46% in level five essays and 45% in level twos. There were no outliers and the standard deviation for the level fives was 0.9; for the level twos it was 0.13. Initially, it seemed that essays of poor quality would have a much different figure, but this turned out not to be the case. What made these level two papers just passing was their length and limited factual content (recall that analysis is only one dimension on this rubric).
Text complexity is an important factor in evaluating student writing. The Flesch-Kincaid readability formula is one well-known method for calculating the grade level readability of a text. In an evaluation of the “richness” of a student’s use of analysis, text complexity is a significant and distinguishing feature. The “analysis score” is a figure intended to convey that combination of text complexity and words spent on cause-effect type analysis. This figure is calculated by multiplying the percentage of unique words spent on cause-effect by 100, and then multiplying by the grade level result of the Flesch-Kincaid formula. This measure yielded more differentiating results. In order to discover ranges of normal performance based on these models, the following statistics were calculated for each data set: lowest score (MIN), first quartile(Q1), median(MED), third quartile(Q3), and highest score(MAX).
If this corpus of sixty essays can be considered representative, then the ranges can be considered standards in assessing the richness of secondary level student analysis in a writing sample. These figures can be used to devise a rubric. On a scale of one to four where four is the highest valued sample, the following ranges are derived from the combined statistics of all sixty essays:
Incorporation of Cause-Effect Assessment into AI-Assisted Grading
The artificially-intelligent grading assistance provided subscribers at InnovationAssessments.com, to date, estimates grades for student composition work based on a comparison of eleven text features of the student sample from a comparison with the most similar model answer in a corpus of one or more model texts. In cases where expository compositions are valued higher for being “analytically rich”, incorporating this cause-effect function could refine and enhance AI-assisted scoring.
Firstly, the algorithm will examine the most similar model in the corpus to the student sample. If the analysis score of the model text is greater than or equal to 419, then it is assumed analysis is a feature of the response’s value. In this case, an evaluation of the “analytical richness” of the student’s work will be incorporated into the scoring estimate. Samples that are more analytical will have greater chances of scoring well.
Conclusion
An artificially intelligent grading program for secondary student expository writing that includes an evaluation of the richness of analysis in that text would be very valuable. Cause-effect statements are indicators of analysis. The algorithm described here identifies and extracts these sentences, processes them for meaningful analysis, and judges the quality of the student’s analysis with a number which incorporates a measure of the proportion of words spent on analysis and text complexity. An analysis of sixty samples of student writing yielded a range of scores at four levels of quality for use in artificial grading schemes. While this algorithm does not detect all varieties of cause-effect relationships nor even all types of analysis, its incorporation in already established artificial scoring programs may well enhance the accuracy and reliability of the program.
Asghar, N. (May 2016). Automatic Extraction of Causal Relations fromNatural Language Texts: A Comprehensive Survey. Retrieved from https://arxiv.org/pdf/1605.07895.pdf.
Mirza, Paramita. (2016). Extracting Temporal and Causal Relations between Events. 10.13140/RG.2.1.3713.5765 .
Sorgente, A., Vettigli G., & Mele F. (January 2013) Automatic extraction of cause-effect relations inNatural Language Text. Retrieved from http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1109/paper4.pdf .
My first experience with asynchronous discussion forums came in courses I was taking myself online through Empire State College a number of years ago. Many readers will recognize the assignment: given a prompt, students are to post their response and then reply to the responses of a number of other students in the class. Typically, there was a deadline by which these discussions had to take place. I liked the exercise and I found it useful to address the course material.
Promoters of asynchronous discussion forums point out rightly that this task brings greater participation than face-to-face class discussions do. Whereas in the latter situation, participation may be dominated by an extroverted few or limited in other ways, the online forum brings everybody in. Asynchronous discussion leave time for research and reflection that is not practical in the face-to-face class. There are some practical considerations for students at the middle and high school level that are not usually issues at the college level.
My Experience
I used asynchronous form discussions in my middle and high school social studies classes for a decade. This occurred in each unit of student. In my context, students were assigned a persuasive prompt to which they were expected to take a position and post two supporting reasons. Next, they were assigned to present the opposing view to another student (even if it did not match their actual personal views), and finally they were to defend their original position in reply to the student who was assigned to present the opposing view to themselves.
Sample 7th Grader Exchange
Seventh and eight graders needed training right off the bat, naturally. Accustomed to social media, their early contributions were vapid and full of emojis and “txt” language. It was important to remind them that this was a formal enterprise and that standard English conventions held. It was often difficult to get them to elaborate their ideas toward the 200-word goal set for their opening post.
Not the kind of thing I as looking for!
I was working in a small, rural school where I would have the students from grades seven through ten, so I could see their work develop over the years.
By end of 9th grade, posts became more sophisticated
I found it to be a good practice to offer the highest marks to those who provided evidence and cited a source. I coded a citation generator right in the forum app to encourage this.
Grading the Posts
Scoring these can be labor intensive for no other reason than the layout of the forum itself. The page is designed for reading and responding, but this does not work well for scoring because there is too much scrolling and searching necessary to view posts and replies.
The scoring app makes it easy for the teacher to view the rubric, the student’s posts, and their replies to others in one place. Analysis tools lets the teacher see how many posts, when they were made, and even the readability level of the contributions.My early discussion grading rubric.The grading rubric I adopted later on.
Practical Issues
The main problem I encountered in this assignment was that students would forget to complete it at first. I resolved this by assigning it in class and giving time. For example, on the first day I would present the prompt and instruct students to post their positions that class period before continuing with the day’s other work. The following day, students would have time to post their replies and finally a third day they would post their defense.
Another issue that came up was getting everyone the needed number of replies. Some posts would attract more replies than others. Some students needed a reply so they could offer defense. The solution was to modify the assignment and declare that, once one has posted, one is obliged to offer the opposing view to the person above in the forum feed.
Interestingly, these assignments also led to face-to-face spontaneous class discussions, sometimes with me and sometimes with a group. Although this may have been somewhat distracting for students in the class working on other things, we found some compromise time to allow these spontaneous interactions to proceed without disrupting the other work much. These were golden opportunities, conversations of enormous educational benefit that are so hard to artificially initiate and encourage.
I came to regard the discussion each unit as a sort of group persuasive writing effort. I included training in grade eight in persuasive writing and logical fallacies. The discussion app here at Innovation has a feature which allows readers to flag posts as committing a logical fallacy.
The Innovation Discussion Forum App is a 21st Century Learning Space
Guardrails: The app lets the teacher monitor all conversations and to delete problematic ones.
Training Wheels: The teacher can attach a grading rubric and sample posts. I used to post first under a pseudonym to whom the first student could reply. Additionally, weaker students can peruse the posts of stronger students in an effort to get a clear picture of the kinds of opinions that can be had on the issue.
Debriefing: Debriefing is easily achieved by projecting the discussion screen on the from board. Students posts in this task are not anonymous.
Assessment and Feedback: The scoring app is very efficient and highly developed from years of use. The teacher can view all pf the student’s posts and replies without having to scroll across the entire platform. Analysis tools reveal the readability of the text, how much they wrote, how analytical it is.
Swiss Army Knife: The discussion app lends itself well to more in-depth persuasive writing assignments such as an essay.
Locus of Data Control: The student chat submissions are stored on a server licensed to the teacher’s control. Commercial apps such as FaceBook and Twitter may be less dedicated to the kinds of privacy and control exigencies of education.
Ideas in Closing
Asynchronous discussions are great – my students and I enjoyed these tasks. It is my view that higher level thinking demanded by persuasion and debate (Bloom’s evaluation level of the cognitive domain) really enhance long-term memory of the content. I cannot emphasize enough the value of these kinds of higher-order task. Working in a 21st century learning space promotes the participation of everybody.
