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Greater Expectations: Teaching and Assessing for Academic Skills and Knowledge in the General Education History Classroom
Kevin M. Casey
Alverno College
| GREATER EXPECTATIONS: A New Vision for Learning as a Nation Goes to College, a recently published national report by the Association of American Colleges and Universities, calls for a radical restructuring of liberal arts education in American colleges and universities. Rather than defining liberal arts education in terms of course content and credit hours, the report suggests that students in the twenty-first century need institutions of higher education to develop their practical and intellectual skills, dispositions, ethical and civic responsibility, as well as their knowledge of the disciplines taught in their general education and major courses. The report specifies a set of twenty national practical liberal arts outcomes that create "intentional learners" who are empowered, informed, responsible, and able to apply their knowledge and skills to a variety of real world environments.1 |
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This report represents just one recent example of a national movement toward outcome-based education. Whether teachers like it or not, outcome (or standards based) education has become the norm in the United States education system. From kindergarten through college and beyond into professional and graduate programs, teachers at all levels are expected to teach toward defined outcomes that combine knowledge and transferable academic skills, specifying both what students need to learn and what they should be able to do with what they learn. National disciplinary standards, state academic standards, national educational panels, professional accrediting bodies, academic institutions, as well as academic departments, all define these outcomes.2 |
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The reality is that while teachers are increasingly expected to teach to standards, many don't. Some faculty resist because they believe it intrudes on their academic freedom and will prevent them from teaching and testing students as they desire. Others are reluctant to embrace outcome based education because they fear they will have to slash vital content and dumb-down their courses if they also have to teach and evaluate specific academic skills. However, many faculty do recognize the importance of teaching for outcomes that incorporate both content and skills, but they are not sure how to accomplish this effectively. I have encountered all of these concerns while working with faculty from other institutions on teaching and assessing for learning outcomes. These concerns all stem from viewing teaching and assessing for content and skills as an additive process rather than as an integrated one. |
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Teaching students academic skills takes time. However, if these skills are important to the discipline and faculty expect students to demonstrate them, then faculty have an obligation to both teach and assess for such skills. I view it as important for students in a general education history course which I teach to be able to analyze sources and write historical interpretations because these skills will make them more critical evaluators of the history they encounter after my class. In my general education history courses, I teach and assess for historical analysis in an integrative and developmental way. Students not only learn the historical content that one would expect would be covered in the course, but they also learn the higher order thinking skills we would want of all educated citizens. |
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I teach a history course on the United States in the 1960s as one of many humanities courses students may choose to meet their general education requirements. Most of the students who enroll in this course are sophomores and most are not history majors or minors. The course has proven popular in attracting non-majors because of the sexiness of its content. So I use the course to introduce them to the discipline of history, to interest them in the further study of history, and to make them critical evaluators of the history they encounter in our culture. |
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Alverno College, the institution where I have taught for fifteen years, has had an outcome based curriculum since the early 1970s. We teach for eight abilities across the curriculum and each of these abilities is defined according to six developmental levels. The integral abilities infused throughout the curriculum include communication skills, analysis, problem solving, social interaction, effective citizenship, the development of global perspective, valuing in decision-making, and aesthetic engagement.3 Instructors develop specific course outcomes that integrate the course content with the abilities they will be teaching and assessing in their courses. These expected outcomes, which are made explicit in course syllabi, are shaped both by the knowledge of the discipline expected in the major as defined by the departmental faculty and by the developmental level of students in the course. |
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Two integral abilities of my United States in the 1960s course are analysis and communication and those abilities are embedded in my course outcomes. For example, one of the course outcomes states: "The student will construct and effectively communicate a personal understanding of key aspects of United States history during the 1960s based on an analysis of historical monographs, historical documents, cultural artifacts and artistic works." Students must clearly demonstrate analysis and communication skills to successfully achieve this outcome. The course syllabus further delineates what students are expected to do to demonstrate the integral abilities in this course. Under analysis the syllabus states that:
- The student uses modes of reasoning to relate and organize historical information into explanations about aspects of the past.
- The student provides sufficient relevant evidence from secondary and primary historical sources to develop a convincing argument about aspects of the past.
- The student makes relationships between and among her observations and inferences about human behavior and expressions and the historical and social context.
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I believe that in working towards these outcomes students are practicing and better understanding the discipline of history. More importantly, they come to understand firsthand that historians construct history based on their analysis of sources and that interpretations of history may differ. Most beginning students tend to believe the history they read is objective truth. My objective in the course is to make them more critical evaluators of the history they read or view in academic settings or in popular culture. To this end, I have developed a sequence of learning activities and assessments that I believe illustrate how faculty can assist students to demonstrate both the historical content and the academic skills integrated in expected course outcomes. This sequence of activities demonstrates the historical analysis outcomes outlined above.4 |
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Early in the semester, as an introduction to Kennedy's presidency, students read and analyze Kennedy's inaugural address along with a chapter in the course text on the Kennedy administration.5 In small groups and then as a class, I lead the students through an analysis of the speech by asking them to identify prominent themes and important issues raised and the policy directions they suggest. Students also consider what significant issues are missing from the speech. Finally, they identify any connections they can between themes, issues or approaches articulated in Kennedy's inaugural address and what they have just read about his presidency. I expect students to explain their responses with specific evidence from the speech. This provides students an opportunity to practice analyzing a primary source document in historical context, a skill I will later evaluate in a number of their course assessments. |
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It is critical that students have the opportunity to learn and practice academic skills with guidance and feedback from a teacher before they are called on to tackle the process on their own in an evaluated performance. A good teacher, like a good coach, should demonstrate the skill, give students a chance to practice it, provide instructive feedback and, if necessary, additional instruction, before asking students to perform that skill independently. |
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The first formal assessment for this course focuses on the civil rights movement of the early 1960s. Prior to the assessment, students complete reading on the civil rights movement during the 1950s and early 1960s from a monograph on the movement and analyze documents written by participants in the movement.6 During class, students also watch segments from the Eyes on the Prize documentary series. For this assessment students read three historical documents all written within months of each other in the spring and summer of 1963 by people who played important roles in the movement for civil rights: Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" (16 April 1963), President John F. Kennedy's "Radio and Television Report to the American People on Civil Rights," (11 June 1963) and the original text of John Lewis' speech for the March on Washington (August, 1963) that he revised at the request of key organizers of the march before delivering it.7 While all three of these men supported expanding civil rights for African-Americans at the time, they all played different roles in that task and represented different constituencies. King was the head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), Kennedy was President of the United States and leader of the Democratic Party and Lewis was the Chair of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Students are asked to write a comparative analysis of the views expressed by these three men on the civil rights movement in these documents. Thus, students must independently analyze historical documents similar to Kennedy's inaugural address that they analyzed earlier. |
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The assessment's outcomes and evaluative criteria make explicit the focus on historical analysis. (Students are also expected to meet criteria for written communication required across the curriculum.) They are:
- The student must use analytical reasoning to compare the ideas developed by the three authors on how the country should work to expand civil rights for African-Americans, highlighting areas of agreement and difference in their views.
- The student must demonstrate a sound understanding of relevant developments and groups involved in the civil rights movement to explain the similarities and differences in the views of the three writers.
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| I expect students to synthesize relevant information from the readings, lectures, discussions and the documentary as context for their comparative analysis and, because the criteria by which I'll judge their work are public, students can use them as guides in their drafting and revising process. The criteria are also clearly related to the course outcomes and making this connection clear to students helps them see how this assessment is related to a larger plan for their learning in the course. |
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Since I'm evaluating both the students' knowledge of the early civil rights movement and their historical analysis skills, I expect them to apply what they have learned about the early civil rights movement to each of the documents and to develop an interpretation. For example, can they draw on their understanding of John Lewis's background, what they know about SNCC and their understanding of the development of the civil rights movement in 1963 to explain Lewis's views and rhetoric in his speech? Can they identify key events and other factors, (like the make-up of the Democratic party at the time), that influenced President Kennedy's public statement on civil rights? Can they explain how the immediate events in Birmingham, as well as King's philosophy of non-violent protest are reflected in his "Letter from A Birmingham Jail"? Most college students could successfully compare the views on civil rights expressed in the three documents. However, because my students have studied the historical context in which these documents were written, I expect that their analysis will be deeper and explain key reasons for the differences and similarities in the authors' views. |
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When introducing this assessment, I illustrate the kinds of analytical connections I expect students to demonstrate, using as examples the Kennedy inaugural or other primary source documents we have already analyzed together as a class. The need to model the analytical connections was made painfully evident one semester when I gave the class feedback on this assessment and illustrated some of the analytical connections that many of the students had not made. One of the students responded by saying, "Why didn't you tell us this before the assessment? It would have been a lot more helpful." She was right. Students, just like many teachers, focus mostly on the content of the assessment, often overlooking the academic skills embedded in the criteria that they are expected to demonstrate. |
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I give individual written feedback on this and other assessments in relation to assessment criteria, and when I return their assessments, I also provide the class with feedback on the patterns of student performance, noting those criteria most students performed well on and those criteria a significant number of students did not demonstrate. From successful student examples, I illustrate and teach the struggling students how they might demonstrate the criteria. Since learning is developmental, I don't expect all students to meet all the outcomes in the first assessment and I make that clear to my students. They will have opportunities to demonstrate the historical analysis skills integral to the course using the oral and written feedback on their assessments. This does not mean that after remediation, a student retakes the same assessment; rather it means that in a future course assessment working with new content, the student has another opportunity to demonstrate his or her historical analysis abilities. In this way, the assessment process and my feedback on a student's performances are not only evaluative, but also are an integral part of my teaching and the student's learning in the course. |
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A later assessment in this course evaluates students' historical analysis at a higher level of complexity. Students move beyond making discrete analytical connections, to making multiple analytical connections and organizing them into a historical interpretation or position on a historical question. This assessment occurs during a unit in the course on American involvement in the Vietnam War and its impact on America. In the classes that prepare students for this assessment, they read chapters from their course text on the war in Vietnam from 1945 to 1965, which I supplement with short lectures and class discussion on the topic. Students also view a segment from a documentary on the escalation of the American military involvement in the Vietnam War during the Kennedy presidency and the early years of the Johnson presidency.8 The documentary helps the students contextualize many of the documents they analyze in this assessment because they see and learn about some of the policymakers who wrote the documents and the events surrounding them. |
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For this assessment students write a position paper explaining the factors that contributed to the Kennedy and Johnson administrations' decisions to escalate United States involvement in the Vietnam War between 1961 and 1965. Students must support their positions with evidence from at least four of nine primary source documents as well as with relevant information from the secondary sources they studied. Some of these documents are public statements about the war from President Kennedy and President Johnson and others are internal memoranda about the war by government and military officials and Presidential advisers.9 In their position papers, students must present a pattern of evidence from the primary sources to develop their arguments. |
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Outcomes for this assessment require student demonstration of historical analysis skills. Specifically they must: 1) critically analyze primary documents, 2) create a historical explanation based on the evidence they glean from those documents, and 3) construct their interpretive narrative drawing from both the primary documents and what they know about the historical context. This assessment builds upon students' earlier work analyzing historical documents in context (the Kennedy inaugural address and the civil rights assessment), while extending their analysis to formulating an interpretive position in response to a historical problem. This experience helps students understand at a rudimentary level how historians construct history, opening up to them the discipline of history rather than having them see history only as received facts. |
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Students are expected to set a proper context for the evidence they introduce from the documents in their assessment. This means that in analyzing and presenting the documents they need to consider who authored the document, what audience it was created for, the purpose of the document and its credibility. In earlier class sessions, we have discussed the questions historians ask when analyzing documents (like those above) and we have practiced reading and analyzing primary sources.10 When introducing the Vietnam assessment, I also provide examples of government documents similar to the types students will analyze in this assessment and the class discusses the nature of these documents and how to set context for them in a position paper. Again, I model and practice with students what I expect them to demonstrate in their assessment. |
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In the class session when their position papers are due, I divide the class into groups and have students expand on their individual written analysis of the documents by creating a group position on the rationale for increased American involvement in the Vietnam War based on their collective analysis of the documents.11 Through this collaborative inquiry, the students gain some fresh insights into the documents and they teach each other about additional evidence the documents contain. Each group then presents its position to the class focusing on its analysis of the evidence in the documents. At this point in the process, students also present any significant interpretive disagreements or interpretive questions that arose in their group, and I use these as the basis for a class discussion. By the time the students have completed their individual analyses, their group inquiry presentations and follow-up discussions, they have discovered most of the relevant evidence in the documents. I will of course explain any crucial evidence that they missed. |
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Each student then writes a short self-reflection describing and evaluating the process they used to analyze the documents and to write their position paper. This completes this assessment. I also ask them to identify any additional insights they gained from discussing the approaches used by other students. Note that this self-assessment focuses on students developing and evaluating their own processes for conducting historical analysis and interpretation, a skill which they then can transfer to future learning, as opposed to a mere evaluation of one product—the position paper—that resulted from this process. Students' responses to this self-assessment have provided me with rich insights into the students' analytical abilities, while showing me that this assessment really helps many students understand the necessary blending of evidence and interpretation involved in constructing history. |
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My course begins in the 1950s and ends in 1974 with the resignation of President Richard M. Nixon following the Watergate scandal and his subsequent pardon by his presidential successor Gerald R. Ford. My final assessment for this course, in the form of a debate, again has as its outcome students developing a position on a historical question based on their critical evaluation of primary documents and the historical context in which those documents were written. This gives students an opportunity to apply what they learned about historical analysis and argumentation from the Vietnam position paper with new historical content using a different assessment mode. |
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As in past assessments, readings, lectures, class discussion and a documentary film leading up to this debate are the bases for student learning about the Nixon presidency, the Watergate break-in, the subsequent cover-up and Nixon's resignation and pardon. In this assessment, students evaluate a set of nine documents on Watergate published by the National Archives.12 Based on their weighing of the evidence contained in those documents, students have to take a position, yea or nay, on the historical question: "Was President Gerald R. Ford right to grant Richard M. Nixon a full pardon for any crime he participated in against the United States while serving as President?" |
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As they analyze the documents, students are required to compose a written list of evidence and arguments on both the affirmative and the negative side of the question. Once they have carefully considered the evidence on both sides of the question, they write a developed position with supporting evidence and argumentation. This is a take-home assessment and students have a week to complete it. |
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In the class when students turn in their written analyses and positions, they extend their individual analysis by staging a group debate on the question of Ford's pardon of Nixon. Students are divided into two teams, one yea and one nay on the debate question, and together they determine the evidence and arguments that they will present to support their group's side during the debate. |
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This again provides students the opportunity to learn from each other's analysis and requires them to construct a group synthesis from each other's interpretations. Since students were required to complete a written evaluation of the evidence and arguments on both sides of the question as preparation for the debate, they are able to marshal the strongest evidence and arguments for their side and to anticipate the arguments from the opposition. After each side presents their arguments and evidence, the groups caucus again and formulate a rebuttal. After completing the debate, the students evaluate the strongest evidence and arguments presented on each side of the question. Finally, they write an addendum to their initial written position explaining how, if at all, their initial position on Ford's pardon of Nixon has changed as a result of their participation in the debate and what caused this change. This self-assessment calls on students to reflect on what they learned from others during the debate, and also to synthesize the views of others with their own views, a very practical general education skill. |
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Students who successfully complete this course demonstrate an understanding of the history of the United States during the 1960s and also acquire strong foundational historical analysis skills, namely the ability to interpret historical documents in context and to construct historical interpretations based on a synthesis of primary and secondary sources. Through this sequence of assessments and learning activities, I systematically teach and evaluate students' understanding of the course content while simultaneously teaching and evaluating their historical analysis abilities at increasing levels of complexity. I also provide students with multiple opportunities to demonstrate the historical analysis skills contained in the course outcomes, each time working with new content. Thus my course assessments not only evaluate student learning, but also become an integral part of a developmental teaching process, as feedback and practice from one assessment imparts learning for the next. Students emerge from the class with their own framework for understanding America in the 1960s and with a critical historical consciousness, which they can draw on as they encounter history in popular culture or in other academic settings. |
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As a historian and educator, I want the general education student who may take only one or two history courses in college to learn more than just the course content. I want him or her to learn something about what it means to do history. By experiencing firsthand how history is constructed students become better critical evaluators of the history they subsequently encounter, whether it's in a film like The Gangs of New York, an episode of American Dreams, or the historical background for a contemporary news story. In all cases, students should be raising critical evaluative questions about the historical interpretation being presented to them. Teaching history in a way that integrates content and critical academic skills enriches the general education curriculum for students and in some students it kindles an interest to further study history. |
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Notes
1. Greater Expectations
National Panel, Greater Expectations: A New Vision for Learning
as a Nation Goes to College, A National Panel Report (Washington,
DC: Association of American Colleges and Universities, 2002),
xi. <
http://www.greaterexpectations.org
>[15 May 2003].
2. Ibid., Developing Educational Standards (Wappingers Falls, NY: Wappingers Central School District) contains links to National Academic Standards by subject area and to state academic standards. <http://edStandards.org/Standards.html> [15 May 2003]. National Board for Professional Teaching Standards is an example of professional accreditation standards. <http://www.nbpts.org/> [15 May 2003]. Alverno College History Department, Ability-Based Learning Program: The History Major (Milwaukee, WI: Alverno College Institute, 2001) contains an example of department generated major outcomes.
3.Student Assessment-as- Learning at Alverno College, rev. 3d ed. (Milwaukee, WI: Alverno College Institute, 1994).
4. Another teaching and assessment thread in this course concerns the social and cultural history of the decade and explicitly focuses on assessing students' valuing and aesthetic engagement abilities.
5. For texts in this course I have used both David Farber, The Age of Great Dreams: America in the 1960s (New York: Hill and Wang, 1994) and Terry Anderson, The Sixties (New York: Longman, 1999). President Kennedy's inaugural address is available at the John F. Kennedy Library and Museum website (Boston, MA: John Fitzgerald Kennedy Library). <www.jfklibrary.org> [15 May 2003].
6. I often require Harvard Sitkoff, The Struggle for Black Equality, rev. ed. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993) on the civil rights movement for the course. Students also read documents and excerpts from memoirs by people who played an active role in the civil rights movement from Alexander Bloom and Wini Breines, "Takin' it to the streets": A Sixties Reader, 2d ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 13–48. I supplement this with excerpts from the Eyes on the Prize (Alexandria, VA: PBS Video, 1986) to allow students to see images of the people and events they are reading about. Program four in the series, "No Easy Walk, 1961–1963," sets historical context for and contains visuals from all three documents used in this assessment. These include King reading from his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail," a clip from Kennedy's Civil Rights address and still photos of Lewis and others rewriting his speech at the March on Washington.
7. Martin Luther King Jr.,'s "Letter from a Birmingham Jail," is available at the Martin Luther King Jr. Papers Project at Stanford University website (Stanford, CA: Stanford University). <http://www.stanford.edu/group/King> [15 May 2003]. President Kennedy's, "Radio and Television Report to the American People on Civil Rights," is available on the John F. Kennedy Library and Museum website (Boston, MA: John Fitzgerald Kennedy Library). <www.jfklibrary.org> [15 may 2003]. John Lewis's original text for his speech at The March on Washington is reprinted in Bloom and Breines, "Takin' it to the streets", 27–29.
8. The students view the documentary program "LBJ Goes to War," Vietnam: A Television History (Boston: WGBH, Boston, 1983).
9. The idea for this assessment came from a set of documents and questions in James J. Lorence, Enduring Voices: Document Sets to Accompany The Enduring Vision, 2d ed., Volume 2: From 1865, "Critical Decisions: "Waist-Deep in the Big Muddy"' (Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath and Company, 1993), 313–24. A great source for on-line documents to use with this assessment is Vincent Ferraro, ed. Documents Relating to American Foreign Policy: Vietnam, (South Hadley, MA: Mount Holyoke College, International Relations Program). <http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/vietnam.htm> [15 May 2003]. Bloom and Breines, "Takin' it to the streets", 153–69 also has a series of internal and public documents from the Kennedy and Johnson administrations on Vietnam War policy that can be used for this assessment.
10. In this course I use Bloom and Breines, "Takin' it to the streets": A Sixties Reader, which is a great collection of primary source documents from the 1960s. Every week students read and analyze specific documents in conjunction with readings from course texts. The Library of Congress, "The Historian's Sources," American Memory, The Learning Page has a lesson which introduces students to primary sources and describes key rules and questions historians use when analyzing sources. <http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/ndlpedu/lessons/psources/pshome.html> [15 May 2003]. I have adapted this exercise for use with my students when they begin work with primary source documents.
11. Students bring two copies of their position papers to class: one they turn in for evaluation and the other they use during the class. Their position paper is their ticket into this class session; without it they can't participate in this class session.
12. National Archives and Records Administration, Watergate, (Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt Publishing Co., 1992).
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