Through Canadian Historical Assessments of Thinking (CHATs), To The Past aims to assist teachers and learners in moving towards a deeper and more robust historical inquiry. CHATs, as small-scale formative assessments, allow students to practice sourcing, contextualizing, closely analyzing and corroborating evidence on a regular basis, developing a familiarity and sophistication when working with primary sources. Explore our collection here.
BLOG: BREAKING DOWN THE GUIDEPOSTS, OR AT LEAST A FEW
The assessment triangle emphasizes the importance of coherence between what is being assessed, as in what aspect of cognition or thinking, how that cognition will be observed, and how resulting data will be interpreted.
I believe that the assessment that I have provided and continue to provide students has been, to the best of my power, generally fair, and broadly accurate in its judgment of student skills and abilities. But, what aspect of cognition was I really assessing when I reviewed student responses to a Document Based Question? I was likely assessing a multitude. As a macro tool, imperfect, but useful. However, might there be more precise or surgical tools to assess student performance within specific competencies or skills that undergird the epistemology of history? And how could those tools be used to formatively assess students in order to support them in more robust historical inquiry?
BLOG: THE FIRST THANKSGIVING – THE STARTING POINT
When beginning to draft the first Canadian History Assessments of Thinking, the most obvious space to explore for inspiration was the Stanford History Education Group’s (now Digital Inquiry Group) Beyond the Bubble Assessments.
Perhaps their most well-known is one of their flagship models, “The First Thanksgiving”. At its root, The First Thanksgiving aims to illuminate for teachers whether or not students are attending to the metadata of a source, in this case, a painting. Students are challenged to note the discrepancy between the event date and time of the source’s creation, and how that might impact the helpfulness of the source as evidence of what happened during the original event.