history essay rubric

history essay rubric

Developing a Comprehensive History Essay Rubric

1. Introduction to Essay Rubrics

For many teachers, using a single-point rating scale rubric to grade history essays is a highly commonsense practice that seems to cohere with the traditional way in which we are often trained to think and act both as college students and as history teachers. The single-point scale represents a broadly shared range of qualitative differences in historical writing. It enables teachers to distinguish properly between lower and higher scoring student work and, when used in combination with a well-crafted and detailed task-specific essay prompt, to calibrate and communicate high expectations about the meaningful depth of information that deserves to be supported with rich and relevant historical evidence. Yet, the rubric question I have been addressing with Project Information Literacy (PIL) Essay Rubric Development Team (ERDT) faculty colleagues is: How well do our present essay rubrics and composition assignments actually achieve our intended philosophical objectives, specifically for types of historical writing that teachers might find important in their own undergraduate history courses?

2. The Importance of Rubrics in History Education

When we communicate value by giving a grade to student writing, it needs to stem from a systematic, uniform, and fair way to score the product. Educational rubrics provide this bridge between values and subjective grading. To be clear, many roads lead toward or away from learning, but education rubrics, as a common language for teachers and students, create a direct path toward clear communication regarding strengths and weaknesses in a historical essay. Upon uniting these constituencies, common values emerge, and teaching practices can be refined to go beyond covering content to get at what we value most about doing history: plain, methods, questions, and connections.

It is widely acknowledged in the scholarship on history teaching and learning that effective assessment practices are essential to positive student outcomes. To support this aim, technocratic accountability drives schools and school systems to improve the practice of scoring student history writing, as well as standardized tests. Within this scenario, the history profession has an opportunity to seize control of the scoring process and make sure that it does justice to the work of historians and the historical community. This chapter presents a high-stakes rubric developed in cooperation with the educational testing and assessment company ACT that is well positioned to address the assessment component of national history and international tests. It also addresses a well-studied educational practice, the use of rubrics, by presenting the development of a comprehensive rubric designed especially to assess high school written essays on history tests.

3. Key Components of a History Essay Rubric

I promise that this rubric is not just one of those things where you tell students, “here’s a rubric,” and expect them to just start magically writing perfect papers, but it is a step in the right direction. A good rubric is more than a simple list—a checklist of small, trivial reasons why students’ writing is bad. It brings together a variety of criteria broken down into levels of performance. Therefore, I’m going to standardize expectations for all my students, and finally, I also realize that I need to start preparing my students earlier in the year for their AP exam. I hope that using this rubric will succinctly teach students how to write an AP style essay. My goal of using this rubric is to facilitate how well my students develop their historical thinking skills. A good AP history essay must develop a well-reasoned line of historical argument. It tasks which require critically evaluating alternative historiographies.

Each year, more than a million Advanced Placement (AP) essays are written, and surprisingly, a majority of college students are unable to independently craft an essay that would earn even a 3 score. Consequently, schools are spending valuable class time teaching students basic writing skills and why they are in college. Writing is a major problem that history educators face. Complicating our problem is that we do not have a writing rubric designed specifically for a high school history essay. Most educators use a generic or holistic rubric that lacks the necessary definitions for high standards and acceptable student work. In addition, some educators criticize the peer evaluation format because students often give inflated scores regardless of the quality of the essay. In this paper, I will address these two questions: What are the key components of a history essay and in particular a high scoring history essay from historical contexts? And, what are the key components of an effective history essay rubric designed to improve upon past methods of assessing writing?

4. Designing and Implementing an Effective Rubric

The most useful rubric describes not just what an essay does, but also how and why; the strongest criteria and methods are located at the intersection of assessment and instruction. Rubrics describe a discrete skill and employ a simple, concrete, finite scale. The best solution to the problem of a meaningful yet simple history essay rubric is to understand the factors that make history outcomes complex. After a teacher designs a rule-oriented history essay rubric, assembles a prompt that invites focused historical thought, and transmits the assignment, he or she should both carefully read all essays and also grade them with a similarly rigorous method. Teachers should also calculate an interrater agreement coefficient.

To effectively evaluate a history essay – no easy task given the many dilemmas associated with the assignment – a teacher needs a comprehensive set of concepts and methods. Several key principles can help create an accurate and fair essay report card. The best essay rubric is a rule-oriented one, distinguishing between levels with rules, not simply spotters. Since few history outcomes are appropriate for dichotomous evaluation, and many instances of excellent historical thought do not fit well into preconceived rubric categories, a comprehensive history essay rubric will not necessarily have equal intervals. Writing and using a comprehensive history essay rubric are the first steps toward clear and supportive evaluation, and are also the best ways to transform writing as a process and as an outcome.

5. Case Studies and Examples of Successful History Essay Rubrics

I will start listing essays that were repeatedly presented by the student themselves as their most successful work. By using the students’ self-assessments as a criterion of success, I am also reflecting the students’ learning because they were weighted more than the staff’s contribution in the final marking of the assignment. For brevity, each essay has a detailed presentation in its own paragraph. I will then expand or approach other rubrics which have been applied years ago as some examples of a transition strategy implementing specific features that were good in them into new and carefully designed ones with improved grading scales.

In this section, I will present a series of successful history essay rubrics. All of the rubrics presented in this assignment reflect their emphasis on including history-specific criteria and their links – in the feedback they enable to students – between the learning aims of academia and the professional job where the knowledge acquired will be later applied. Since only a few of the essays find a good use of secondary sources, the contents of this section will review a variety of topics to describe a variety of essay assignments. Overall, after describing the academic contents in depth, diverse approaches used in the assessment of the quality of the written product, namely the appraised criteria, the score range, and the scale, will follow.