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Scapbooking Learning (cont’d)

Posted on March 22, 2006 by Mills

I’ve now completed the grading of the first round of scrapbooks that my students turned in for my Western Civ class. As one would expect, their performance was all of the map. By far their best work was for the personal history assignment I give them. Once again these essays (mostly) displayed excellent research, careful writing, and even some historical analysis. Their essays included a wide variety of primary sources–everything from a marriage license from Cuba to an audio tape of a young man facing a mortar barrage in Viet Nam.

Now I need to figure out how to get them to bring the same level of effort to their other historical writing. The essays they wrote on The Return of Martin Guerre, for instance, were (mostly) devoid of evidence and were just not written as well.

One thing that is clearly at play here is that they care about what they are writing about when they write about their family and its history and they just don’t care much about Bertrande de Rols, Arnaud du Tilh and Martin Guerre. Another issue is relevance–the history of their family seems to have relevance over and above their desire to do good work on an assignment about a loved one, while the social realities of Artigat, France seem much less relevant. I’m going to have to think on this and try to figure out new assignments about the past that matter as much in the hope that if the assignment matters, they’ll put more into it (and thus get more out of it).

Finally, only one student in the class turned in anything that would qualify as “new media”, even though Ieft the format of their scrapbooks entirely up to them. This one example was a PowerPoint presentation. By contrast, three students turned in scrapbooks that looked like the scrapbook your family might have from its last vacation.

Scapbooking Learning (cont’d)

Posted on January 21, 2006 by Mills

A reasonable question that could be asked about my plan to require a “historical scrapbook” from my students this semester is how I might assess the quality of their work. Because I expect my students to ask just this question, I’ve given them a set of assessment guidelines, drawn heavily from a grading rubric that Lendol Calder of Augustana College uses for his student essays. I’m hoping that giving them explicit evaluation criteria on day one will help them to create scrapbooks that make it possible for me to see just how much they’ve learned during the semester.

My handout says:

Your scrapbook will be evaluated each time according to the following criteria, with a different emphasis depending upon the nature of the content.

Comprehension: Did you understand what the author of the source or the book was saying or meant? Does your annotation, blog posting, or essay accurately reconstruct the literal meaning of what you read and is it free of misconceptions of authors’ meanings.

Questions and Thesis: Are you asking good historical questions, which are then answered (in your essays or blog postings). If the answer is in an essay, does it take the form of a thesis that makes a significant claim that can be supported by evidence.

Analysis-Connecting: Did you understand how what you read fits into a bigger picture? Does your work connect information from various sources and how well does it compare, contrast, corroborate, or observe interesting links.

Analysis-Causality: Does your work demonstrate an understanding of notable change over time? Is attentive to multiple causation and does it avoid simplistic explanations?

Analysis-Sourcing: Does your work demonstrate that you know what the sources you’ve collected are good for and does it identify sources, contextualize and assess documents for bias, reliability, point of view?

Multiple Perspectives: Does your work demonstrate an understanding of how others might plausibly interpret this evidence differently? Does it consider more than one point of view and rebut or concede possible objections to your thesis (in essays)?

Humility: Does your work demonstrate an understanding of what you do not know that you need to know? Is it appropriately self-critical; does it admit contrary evidence; qualify arguments; recognize limits to your historical knowledge?

Research: Does your work use relevant sources found on your own and demonstrate creativity in the finding of those sources?

Prose Style: Does your work use correct grammar and punctuation and is it written in clear, compelling prose?

Self-Reflective: Does your reflection on your work accurately summarize the strengths and weaknesses of your own learning? Does it display an awareness of what you know, don’t know, and should know?

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