Authentic Assessment In Social Studies

This engaging book will show you how to move beyond tests and essay writing to implement authentic assessments in your middle or high school social studies classroom. Award-winning teacher David Sherrin explains the value of authentic assessments and offers practical ways to get started and dive deeper in your own practice. You’ll be encouraged and inspired by the real-life stories of classroom successes and failures that illustrate the points throughout the book. The chapters cover a range of categories, including different types of written, creative, and civic action assessments. The book includes: planning charts and rubrics showing how to use, grade, and give feedback on assessments so they truly aid student learning and progress specific examples, useful tips, and ready-to-go instructions that you can use immediately with your class open-ended assessments encourage scaffolding or adaptation for individual or group work to fit your classroom needs You will learn how to personalize instruction and provide students with avenues for creativity and the types of learning experiences they need to be prepared for a complex world.

The Handbook of Classroom Assessment takes a multi-dimensional approach to classroom assessment. A successful combination of theory and practice, the book emphasizes the assessment of classroom learning within content areas and the development of standards for evaluation. Most chapters are devoted to the assessment of learning and achievement and discuss current theories. The book also features assessment of academic self-concept and subjective well-being in children and adolescents. The Handbook provides successfully field-tested examples of assessment techniques and strategies within the content areas of mathematics, social studies, foreign languages, and the visual arts. Contributing chapter authors share the unique distinction of having backgrounds that include both the development of assessment theory and first hand experience translating theory into practice at the classroom, school site, state, or national level. The book is divided into four sections. Section I discusses the top five theories with respect to what learning is, how it's related to achievement, and how we assess both in the classroom setting. Section II on standardized assessment briefly covers all major standardized achievement tests used in preschool, K-6, and 7-12. Assessment of classroom learning, Section III, presents test instruments and techniques specific to the measurement of math skills, social science skills, and artistic talent across ages and grades. Section IV on classroom practices includes an assessment of general reasoning skills and performance and how to develop a grading philosophy. Key Features * Explains the why, what, and how of classroom assessment * Combines theory and practice for a multidimensional approach to assessment * Presents test instruments and techniques specific to measuring various skills * Uses field-tested examples of assessment techniques * Provides a resource for staff development at the school site

First Published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This book examines, through case studies of elementary and secondary schools, how five schools have developed “authentic,” performance-based assessments of students’ learning, and how this work has interacted with and influenced the teaching and learning experiences students encounter in school. This important and timely book reveals the changing dynamics of classroom life as it moves from more traditional pedagogy to one that asks students to master intellectual and practical skills that are eminently transferable to “real-life” social settings and workplaces. “The issue of assessment comes first, but we see in the following case studies how it becomes powerfully enveloped in the processes of learning and teaching, of informing students, teachers, parents, and others of ‘how the children are doing.’ The portraits explicitly and implicitly suggest a deep, fair, and defensible way to answer the question ‘How’m I doing?’ in a manner that helps this child and eventually every child.” —From the Foreword by Theodore R. Sizer “Informative and thought provoking.” —American Journal of Education

This updated third edition contains new chapters on important issues—including race, gender, sexuality, and multiculturalism—affecting social studies education.

The importance of social studies assessment is beyond question. The National Council of the Social Studies’ C3 Framework recognizes the importance of high?quality assessments—its major objective, a “deep understanding of the sociocultural world,” has as its underpinning the idea that students must be able to investigate the world, and that teachers much be able to assess their understanding of it. However, there is a comparative dearth of research that focuses on effective social studies assessment, particularly with regard to the impact of teacher practice on the development of best practices. Such research is vital to moving social studies away from an emphasis on testing and more towards using assessment as a means of educating our students. In Best Practices of Social Studies Assessment, we focus on an essential question: what is an "effective" assessment? Helping teachers develop practical, creative, curriculum?appropriate strategies is essential, especially in an era in which teachers are faced with the dilemma of creating inquiry?based assessments in the midst of preexisting regimes of standardized summative assessments. In this volume, research conducted between university professors and working teachers is described, focusing on innovative assessment practices. These practices include role?playing activities depicting historical events; Socratic seminars revolving around public policy issues; collaborative student projects on a wide range of social inquiries, including the implementation of UN programs; and the promotion of critical thinking and writing skills, on subjects as diverse as school violence and the impact of imperialism. These adaptive assessments highlight the essential role of the teacher in creating assessments that blend higher?order critical thinking, complex content knowledge, and an understanding of their own students. The strategies described in this volume focus on the ability of expert educators to “[acknowledge] the structures, power, and consequences of high?stakes testing regimes while simultaneously designing and sustaining classroom assessment methods that embody the social?participatory nature of learning and reflect research on effective practice” (p. 289). The volume also describes the shared characteristics of the teachers who created these assessments, especially their emphasis on self?reflection and student autonomy, as well as their professional willingness to take on challenges associated with performance?based assessments, even in the face of institutional pressures and external demands.

Help students write about social studies content and build their historical thinking skills! This 2nd edition resource was created to support College and Career Readiness Standards, and provides an in-depth research base about content-area literacy instruction, including key strategies to help students write about and comprehend historical content. Each strategy includes classroom examples by grade ranges (1-2, 3-5, 6-8 and 9-12) and necessary support materials, such as graphic organizers, templates, or digital resources to help teachers implement quickly and easily. Specific suggestions for differentiating instruction are also provided to help English language learners, gifted students, and students reading below grade level.

Technology in the Middle and Secondary Social Studies Classroom introduces pre-service teachers to the research underpinning the effective integration of technology into the social studies curriculum. Building off of established theoretical frameworks, veteran social studies teacher educator Scott Scheuerell shows how the implementation of key technologies in the classroom can help foster higher-level thinking among students. Plentiful, user-friendly examples illustrate how specific educational tools—including games, social media, flipped classrooms, and other emerging technologies—spur critical thinking and foster authentic intellectual work. A rigorous study, Technology in the Middle and Secondary Social Studies Classroom provides a comprehensive, up-to-date research framework for conceptualizing successful, technology-rich social studies classrooms.