John Redding 11/27/2012 EPSY 485 Assignment Assessment During Instruction 1.

School Context My students attend a small (< 200 students) middle school surrounded by corn fields in rural Illinois. They are in the eighth grade, and the course is called US History and Government. The school population is 98% white, and most of the students are low-tomiddle class farmers children. Because of the size of the school, there is only one teacher per subject per grade level, so the students have mixed academic achievement levels. There are no students with IEPs in the eighth grade, because the school is so small, but several children need support when reading documents, especially primary sources. 2. Unit of Study The course, 8th Grade US History and Government, covers both U.S. History and statemandated civics topics. It is split into two semesters. The first semester focuses on The Participatory Citizen, and covers units on Civics, the Constitution, and Economics. The second semester centers on Modern U.S. History, and includes Industrialization through World War II and Prosperity, Imperialism, and Civil Rights from 1950-1980. This assessment takes place during the Constitution unit, but will draw on their experiences from the Civics unit. The essential questions of this unit are: What is the purpose of law?, What makes an effective government?, What are the responsibilities of a government and its citizens?, and What makes a law good, fair, and/or just? This assessment asks students particularly to consider the last two. There are many enduring understandings listed for this unit, but this assessment focuses on Debate whether voting makes a government effective, and Interpret how citizens participate in changing laws. There are 3 learning objectives for this lesson. The first is Describe the various forms institutions take, and explain how they develop and change over time. The second objective is Explain the origins and continuing influence of key ideals of the democratic republican form of government, such as individual human dignity, liberty, justice, equality, and the rule of law. The last is Identify, analyze, interpret, and evaluate sources and examples of citizens rights and responsibilities. These objectives all fall under the Understanding level of Blooms Revised Taxonomy, and they seek to ascertain whether the student can explain the ideas and concepts covered in the lesson. Almost all of the objectives listed for this course fall into this same level of the taxonomy. The challenge of the assessment will be to ensure students also are able to utilize higher-order thinking while reaching the stated course objectives.

3. Assessment Activity The students will be given a list of short (1-2 sentence) primary sources (see Appendix A) from the time of the womens suffrage movement (the Progressive era). Following a lesson on this movement, the 20th Amendment, and the long journey toward truly universal suffrage, the students will be given an in-class assessment in the form of a three-question constructed response worksheet. The constructed response items will allow the instructor to truly assess how much students have learned and not simply their ability to regurgitate or recognize facts. The questions will both highlight the main points of the lesson and gather information about students understanding of those points. The first item asks How did historical events change the tone of the speakers in the fight for womens suffrage over time? (For example, what new code of laws was Abigail Adams referring to? How did the events at that time influence her writing?) This item addresses the first learning objective, asking students to explain how institutions change over time. The question allows students to make use of their factual knowledge about the evolution of the suffrage movement and the foundation of various progressive institutions over the course of almost 80 years from the 1840s to 1920. This item addresses the basic Blooms taxonomy level of Understanding, but it asks students to go beyond that to Analyzing, by requiring them to use their knowledge of historical events to dig into the speaking tone of the people quoted on their document sheets and examine why they spoke the way they did. The second item poses the question, Why did the writers of the Declaration of Sentiments copy the style of the Declaration of Independence? This question addresses the second learning objective by asking students to consider the continuing influence of our key ideals and our founding documents. Again, the central level of Blooms taxonomy being utilized is Understanding, but students are also asked to make the leap to Applying the information, in that this question requires them to employ their background knowledge of the Declaration of Independence to interpret the intentions of the authors of the Declaration of Sentiments, which they were not familiar with until seeing it in their primary source handout. The final item asks students Why does Sojourner Truth ask Aint I a woman? repeatedly? What message is she trying to send? (List specific examples from the Aint I a Woman? Speech). This question again asks students to identify the main idea of a specific primary source, checking for students Understanding, but it goes to the next level of Blooms taxonomy by asking them to interpret the authors intention in using certain rhetorical conventions to make her point. This item thus gives students the chance to Apply the information they have learned. This assessment is reliable, valid, and fair because although the specific information given by each student will be used to inform future instruction, students will be graded

based on completion of each question and basic engagement with the sources. They will not be required to match the answer key (Appendix B) or include specific keywords in order to obtain a perfect score. The teacher will use the assessment to capture diagnostic information about students understandings. Each periods responses will form a composite image of students understandings of the material. These composites can be compared with those from other periods to assess the effectiveness of the lesson and its ability to ensure students gain the desired enduring understandings. This allows the instructor to build in a check for consistency of teaching instruction, and the instructor will be able to compare the results to expected differences among each group of students to ensure the reliability of the assessment. These items clearly address the learning objectives stated, which proves their validity. The grading policy of rewarding effort and assigning criterion-referenced grades shows that this is a fair assessment. 4. Justification for Activity I would grade this activity, because I feel that in order for students to take an assessment seriously, they need to feel that their responses matter. To ensure the most authentic responses possible, I will assign a grade to student performance both to reward students for devoting effort to the assignment and to encourage students to think critically and learn from the assessment. It is important that students directly benefit from any in-class assignment, not simply that the time is used to gather data to improve future instruction. I would allow students most of a normal 50-minute class period to complete this assignment, as the follow-up to a one day lesson on the 20th Amendment. In class writing assignments are hard because of this extensive time requirement, but I feel that they are much more valuable for students than having them fill out a multiple choice questionnaire. Students will be asked to work independently to encourage a diversity of responses. This assignment will be announced before the previous days lesson, to encourage students to pay attention to the information presented. We will use a few minutes at the end of class after the students turn in the assignment to discuss their responses and introduce some of the ideas they were intended to take away from the assignment. Because the documents were intentionally kept short, even the students with reading difficulty should be able to process the information. In order to verify that students have processed the learning objectives, my performance criteria will be evidence of basic understanding including the inclusion of at least one or two pieces of factual information from the lecture and an attempt at higher order thinking by making some reference to the content of the primary source document. If students are unable to provide this factual information, it will be necessary to go back and clarify the major developments in the suffrage movement. If they fail to engage with the primary sources, I will have a class discussion about how to read primary documents and conduct a guided reading activity for students to practice this difficult technique. If students demonstrate a solid grasp on both concepts, I will be able to move on to the next lesson. If only some students have mastered the concepts, I will assign a more challenging DBQ-style essay to them while I go over the concepts for the struggling students.