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The updated New York State Regents examination in United States History and Government, part II, is a short essay task designed to measure students’ ability to work with historic documents. It is a mature version of the “CRQ” found on the tenth grade Global Regents. Students are called upon to understand text, engage it with historical context, and assess a text’s reliability.

In document set 1, students describe the historical context surrounding two documents and identify and explain the relationship between the events and/or ideas found in those documents (Cause/Effect or Similarity/Difference or Turning Point).

Turning point is always the most challenging for students, mainly because it demands a strong knowledge of historical context which only the higher performing students usually possess. In stating similarities and differences, it is important to stress to students that this should be a substantial feature of the two texts, not trivial. For example, some students may respond something like this: “Document one is a cartoon and document two is a newspaper report”. This is trivial and should be discouraged. For cause and effect analyses, remind students that some events may lie outside the documents at hand, so they may need to rely on their historical knowledge.

Click here to short for short essay prompts at my TeachSimple store.

Document set 2 asks students to describe the historical context surrounding two documents and (for one identified document) analyze and explain how audience, or purpose, or bias, or point of view affects the document’s use as a reliable source of evidence.

A good strategy for ensuring students possess the skills to address this task is to be certain to assign one every month or so throughout the year, followed by a debriefing where the class can study their classmates’ work (anonymously) and develop strategies for improvement.

Weaker readers are particularly disadvantaged in this task, although since the test items are field tested before administration it is likely the field testing will mitigate some issues with the difficulty of reading some primary source texts. Students can be taught compensatory reading strategies to help deal with difficult texts.

As always, the challenge is to ensure that students have learned a strong body of historical context. That is, the best marks are reserved for those who actually recall the history and who can analyze it (cause-effect, turning point, etc.) This is best achieved by regularly administering quizzes on historical knowledge. I like to give students time in class to study for these. The apps here at Innovation Assessments are especially suited to that end. A lot of social studies assignments can tend to be just look-it-up and transfer kinds of exercises without real demands on students to remember. This is an easy instruction error to remedy.

Teaching factors affecting the reliability of sources is another matter. This takes a great deal of time and practice and, I would argue, is of upmost importance for a person’s education in this day and age. Students, for the most part, do not intuitively analyze and explain how audience, or purpose, or bias, or point of view affects a document’s use as a reliable source of evidence. They tend to take what we give them on face value. It is important to teach students to think critically and approach all historic documents with a healthy skepticism.

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I think teaching reliability should begin young, down in middle school. Engaging students with documents that have very vague reliability weights is a good practice. In a debriefing after the task, it is useful to anonymously display some student reliability evaluations for all to see and to discuss. It is important to do this regularly, starting off right at the start of the school year. There are really no stock phrases that students can learn by rote for this, given the variety of context and source material. I had the benefit of working in a small school where I had the same students grades seven through ten or eleven, so I could implement reliability assessments early in my program. In larger school districts, it would be good to consider a commitment to reliability factor training from an early age. I assigned one longer primary source to analyze each topic (so about once a month). This short essay included an extended analysis of reliability in a conclusion paragraph. The training paid off and when my eleventh graders were preparing for the Regents in US History and Government, they had little difficulty with reliability factors.

A good piece of advice on this is to assign students to do this every month in grade eleven. I suggest assigning it as a test each time. Coach students on the historical context they have to memorize in advance. Lots of teachers assign these for homework, but this entirely misses the point of such training. Student independent work practices are highly efficient in applying the minimal effort to a task, including copying their colleagues’ work or copy-pasting from a source. If they are not doing these without notes, they’re not really practicing.

If you are afraid to assign your students this as a test because they are not likely to do well at first and don’t want to bother their GPA, I recommend using standardized scoring. You can use the z-score calculator here at Innovation Assessments. Use 78 as your standard mean and 14.8 as your standardized standard deviation. Read more about standardized scoring here and where I got those figures. The beauty of this system is you can apply this to their grades every month and as the class improves, as the class average approaches the standardized mean (78 in this case), then the algorithm affects their scores less and less.

Once you have scored their papers, select out some problem responses for class discussion in a debriefing. Keeping the responses anonymous, review how to improve the answers next time.

The short essay is 14% of the Regents score, so for passing the text it’s a good practice. But I would suggest that this kind of work as a regular lesson is extremely valuable as an educational tool. Studying primary sources rightly should take center stage in our social studies lessons. It is not just teaching to the test to do this. It is developing a critical thinking skill set and insisting on recall of historical context that are the values here. Remember, that the highest valued performance is that which is based on a substantial recall of historical context!

Dear fellow social studies teachers,

I would like to play the role of a crusader in this post, if you don’t mind. There’s something I would like you to consider about your teaching practice, or maybe reconsider as the case may be. I’d like you to abandon assigning your students comprehension questions on most kinds of texts you assign in your social studies class. Instead, I’d like you to consider assigning students to summarize instead.

When students do the search and copy instead of reading the text fully, they deny the author the chance to build with the reader an information schema of their own that lends itself to long-term recall.

Okay, so who do I think I am anyway to question a practice that’s at least a century old? Well, I cannot claim to be any super authority. I taught social studies for eighteen of my thirty-two years teaching. I worked in small, rural mountain schools and my roster averaged about one hundred students a year, which is likely smaller than that of my readers. I think these are good starters to convince you to at least hear me, but I have always felt that the argument from authority to be one of the most pernicious fallacies. So in honor of my thirty-two years, grant me the indulgence of reading further. As for accepting my suggestion, let the arguments sway you themselves.

When you assign your students to read a text selection and answer questions on it, you must know what the majority of them do. They skim the text to locate the answer, often they copy it wholesale, and then they’re done. Teachers who accept this kind of work are missing an important opportunity to foster greater reading comprehension skills and greater long-term recall. Writers, even writers of textbooks, build meaning in a schema of content to deliver to the reader, who constructs meaning related to their experience. Ideas are hierarchically arranged and organized to support a set of main ideas. When students do the search and copy instead of reading the text fully, they deny the author the chance to build with the reader an information schema of their own that lends itself to long-term recall. At the risk of putting too fine a point on it, questions on text are largely a useless exercise even when the questions are of high quality.

Once students leave sixth grade in my region, the formal lessons in reading stop. But a great number of sixth graders do not read at a sixth-grade level. They cannot advance their reading without texts at their level. And they have to actually read these. It is possible and desirable in middle and junior high school to promote the development of reading in youngsters by structuring what they do to process text. Teaching students to write competent summaries is one of the best ways to let them develop their reading skills. (This should be paired with offering texts at their independent reading level whenever possible).

What does the research say?

Summarizing and note-taking are two of the most useful academic skills students can have. (Marzano, Pickering, & Pollock, 2005)

Summarizing is in the top two most powerful writing tasks that support the development of student reading. (Graham & Hebert, 2010)

Click here to shop my TpT store for passcodes to give your students access to training videos with embedded auto-corrected questions on composing summaries.

Writing to Read

I was greatly influenced by a paper entitled Writing to Read: Evidence for how Writing can Improve Reading in 2010 published by the Carnegie Corporation of New York. A meta-analysis clearly demonstrates that composing summaries is superior to answering questions on text. The reader may argue that this research was conducted to address methods for using writing to enhance reading. But I would argue that (a) this is rightly a major goal of assigning most secondary students a textbook reading task and (b) the same cognitive processes that go into reading comprehension go into long-term recall of information. Students answering questions on text are less likely to be encoding from working memory into long-term memory than those composing summaries in their own words.

The Five and Three Summary Style

Around 2006 when I was making major investments in curriculum and methodology development, I sat down with a noted professor of literacy who happened to be working in our district, Trudy Walp. I explained my qualms about assigning students questions on text and I asked her, what is the very best thing I can have students do with text from a reading specialist’s perspective. She did not hesitate to say: have them retell what they read.

When I assigned my students summaries on their textbook articles early on, my top students wrote terribly long and detailed compositions that were not brief enough to be a summary. I needed to shorten my students’ summaries and to develop a rubric for evaluating the quality of a summary. The resulting task I used for some fifteen years: the Five and Three.

The assignment for the five and three is to summarize the assigned text (usually four pages in a typical high school textbook) in five sentences exactly, no more and no less. This is the “five”. The “three” is the personal reaction to the text. Students were assigned to connect this text to their own life somehow. What does it remind them of? What do they think about what they read? Why? These had to be exactly three sentences long. This was the second element that the reading specialist recommended to me. Students need to make the text meaningful to them in some personal way that makes new information integrate into their preexisting schema.

The five-and-three became the foundation of my students’ textbook reading work. They also had the option of composing Cornell notes for an assigned reading. I would invite the reader to return to the blog for a post dedicated to extolling the virtues of Cornell note-taking. The five-and-three faded in importance in certain classes where video lessons became an effective information delivery tool when reading instruction was no longer a priority.

The Mechanical Summary

The mechanical summary evolved in 2020 when I had a group of learners who struggled and who just would not produce summaries even given time to do so in class. I offered them the opportunity to write a summary by copying the first sentence of each paragraph word-for-word, then to connect and arrange these into complex sentences such that there were only five sentences. They had to compose the three-sentence personal reaction to the text just like normally done. For this, I offered a maximum score of 76 because, I argued, it had less value not being processed in their own words. I reason that not processing in their own words likely limited the ability of encoding to happen from working memory to long-term memory.

With the Assistance of AI

At this point you are likely wondering how you could possibly grade all these summaries. I will grant you, the workload takes some management, but I would argue that it is only slightly more time consuming than grading answers to a set of questions and the benefit to your students makes it all very worth it.

I’m an amateur programmer and I developed an AI grading assistant that is very good at scoring summaries. This app is available to subscribers to Innovation Assessments. Say, why not sign up for a free 60-day trial? The price is surely right if you decide to subscribe?

The AI grading assistant was accurate enough to save me tons of time scoring summaries. The summarizer app actually let me create models on which to train the AI that were highly accurate when compared to human-generated summaries… eerily so!

This blog post describes the AI grading assistant.

The ability to skillfully summarize is a lost art worth recovering for our students. It enhances the development of their reading ability and it promotes greater recall of the content we teach. It’s my hope my experience developing this system can make this suggestion seem do-able and worthwhile.

SOURCES

Graham, S., & Hebert, M. (2010). Writing to Read: Evidence for How Writing Can Improve Reading. New York: Carnegie Corporation.

Marzano, R. J., Pickering, D. J., & Pollock, J. E. (2005). Classroom Instruction that Works: Research-Based Strategies for Increasing Student Achievement. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education, Inc.

When the new Frameworks for social studies in New York State came out about six years ago, the first item that caught my eye was the constructed-response question sets. If you are not familiar with this task, in brief, it calls upon the student to examine historical sources (I use exclusively primary sources) by providing historical or geographic context, identifying the point of view, intended audience, or purpose of a document and then using the two documents in either compare-contrast, cause-effect analysis, or turning point identification.

Originally, the task was supposed to call upon the student to evaluate the reliability of the source. This was scrapped, probably after field testing questions. I regret their decision to scrap this (though it does appear as part of the analogous task, the short essay, in US History grade 11). Students can be taught to evaluate the reliability of sources at an early age (I incorporated it into my sixth- through eighth-grade social studies work). Students can be trained to evaluate based on features like the point of view (bias), intended audience, purpose, time and place, and authorship. Teaching this does require patience and practice. What I think happened is this: few teachers address the reliability of sources and so when they field tested the new exam format, everyone did so poorly that they scrapped the question. I wish I could find out how my kids did. I had been teaching the reliability of sources since they were in middle school.

I advocate a strategy of assigning one CRQ in each unit of study in grades nine and ten without access to notes. I used this as one of the tests at the end of a unit of study. I would tell students about what kinds of documents would appear and what historical context they should be able to recall in advance. It is a challenging task for them.

The first challenge for novices is to understand what it means to provide context. Faced with the question “What is the historical context of this document?”, beginners will retell what the document says. The reason for this mistake is that, since they were little kids, teachers have asked them to relate what a text means to prove they understood it. This task asks students to bring to bear what they know about the history behind the document, which requires a level of recall I don’t think we’re asking students to do enough.

Another challenge for students writing the CRQ is the third question where they must use two documents in analysis. Cause-effect relationships are the easiest for students, it seems, so I teach those first. When students are asked to compare and contrast the documents, some students have to be cautioned to select significant elements to compare. The fact that one document is a map and one is a diary entry, for example, is not a significant fact. The turning point question is the hardest, mostly because it calls on students to recall history and to understand historical trends both before and after the event. I find it useful to break this up into small tasks: first say what the turning point is, then say what is so special about it.

After a difficult task, especially for writing, I like to do a “debriefing”. In the debriefing after the CRQ, I like to share student answers anonymously in a slide show and discuss them. It is a very effective strategy for stamping out common errors early and permanently. Sample debriefing PowerPoints from an eighth-grade and ninth-grade CRQ are posted below.

Certain constant reminders were recurring for all my classes:

— Things are not reliable because of what they say or show.

— Things are not reliable because they are in quotation marks.

— Things are not reliable because they happen to match what you think is already true.

— Unreliable statements can be true.

— When you’re asked for historical context, do not describe what the document says.

And what about middle school? Can the constructed-response task be modified for that level?

Students with an IEP often are very challenged by these tasks because of the reading level of the texts. Since I use primary sources exclusively in my CRQ’s, this is doubly difficult for students with reading limitations. The answer to this is to consider obtaining CRQ’s designed with a lower reading level.

If I may be so bold as to give advice, I would suggest that students do these throughout Global nine and ten, perhaps once a month. I suggest that they be as tests instead of open-book or take-home assignments because students need to prepare for recall situations. The debriefing afterward is vital to class improvement and it makes for a long-lasting correction. I would advocate resisting the temptation to leave this off for the Global ten teacher. It really does take a long time to learn to do this well.

In the early 2000’s, there was a lot of talk about differentiated instruction picking up steam. Whether or not it was just another bandwagon remains to be seen, but it strikes me that differentiating middle and high school social studies classes is not only de rigeur right now but it is the right thing to do. Like anything else, how this is done is worth considering.

As a beginning teacher in the early ’90s, my unconscious goal was to teach the course so every kid would aim to get an A. The unspoken, unchallenged notion seemed to have been that every kid who works hard enough can, and therefore should, get an A. Disabusing myself of this notion improved my teaching practice and, therefore, my students’ progress.

I offer the analogy of a paper grocery bag, when overfilled, breaks at the bottom and all the groceries are lost. It is probably a question of cognitive load, or overload, as the case may be, that inhibits encoding of information into long-term memory.

The concept begins with the idea that the average student across the world earns probably a C or C+ in most courses. That is, after all, the definition of average. This is really the goal of instruction for the majority of students. The mandate is to pass. I was greatly influenced by a paper from 1993 (Dempster, F. N. (1993). Exposing Our Students to Less Should Help Them Learn More. Phi Delta Kappan) in which the author argued that limiting the amount of content delivered will increase how much students retain. Much instruction seems to be guided by the notion that if we inundate students with knowledge they will scoop up more of it, as much as they can. The opposite is the case. I offer the analogy of a paper grocery bag, when overfilled, breaks at the bottom and all the groceries are lost. It is probably a question of cognitive load, or overload, as the case may be, that inhibits encoding of information into long-term memory. The “Basic Proficiency” curriculum is a parallel set of modified tasks for the regular classroom that may be accessed by anybody any time whether special education or not.

The beneficiary of this program is the student who struggles to get that C+ in the course. Their performance and satisfaction is enhanced by offering less; more manageable chunks of data to process, integrate, and retain.

Click here to shop my TpT store for differentiated curriculum materials for social studies grades seven through ten.

So that’s the theory. In practice, it calls for a lot of preparation. I selected key assignments for modification: the reading task, the multiple-choice quiz, a writing task, and capstone options. The system worked thus (scroll to the bottom for sample parallel curricula): students electing basic proficiency at the start of a unit needed to declare their intention at the start. Then as the unit progressed, they accessed the modified versions of each assignment. When I moved my course materials completely online to go paperless in 2019, students changed from pulling modified assignments from a different folder to accessing a different set of links at Innovation Assessments.

For this kind of differentiated instruction to realize its full benefit, it must be paired with some remediation time outside class.

Fairness

I began developing this strategy about 2007. There are a number of key things I learned along the way. The first was to address the issue of fairness. A reasonable critique of differentiated instruction, and an element of this practice that was often overlooked by its proponents in the beginning, was the importance of ensuring that assignments that were different were actually of equivalent value. If student A is doing less than student B, how can student A reasonably expect to earn the same marks as student B? Furthermore, there were cases where strong students chose basic proficiency because they wanted an easy grade. Both of these problems were resolved by setting limits on the maximum score a student could earn on a modified task.

One of my friends in the special education department once made the case that a student with disabilities who was doing their best within their ability should be entitled to an A. I took a more conservative position on this, maintaining that the value of a work product was little influenced by the effort of the producer. There were valid and reliable ways of measuring the quality of student essays and the criteria were unaffected by ability.

Differentiated Reading

I would suggest that one of the key features of this plan, one which I embraced with some reservations at first, was to offer different levels of textbook reading for students on the basic plan. I was able to find history textbooks at a fifth grade reading level for all my classes (I was teaching US history in grades seven and eight and global history in grades nine and ten). In advance of the school year, I selected page numbers of articles that mirrored what was to be assigned from the standard textbook. Students process text in my classes using one of two methods, the “five and Three summary” (blog post coming soon on that) or Cornell Note Taking.

It should be noted that these texts contained about half as many words in a larger font and less than half the information of the standard text. Students choosing the easier reading were also choosing to learn less content. While they may learn some of the missing content from other activities such as my lecture, they were still having less served up to them.

Many assignments were the same for everybody. Each unit progressed through the same type of activities, key elements of which were offered on a modified basis. Management considerations dictated that students had to choose one package or another, Standard Inquiry or Basic Proficiency, on a unit-by-unit basis. the could not choose on a task-by-task basis. It was not possible to manage it.

Don’t Worry: There was plenty of enrichment for advanced students.

In the spirit of differentiation, I maintained a collection of college level books my ambitious learners could choose for their reading assignments. I had developed rubrics for more sophisticated versions of our essay work so students could attempt the next grade level of work. Differentiating for these students was done on a task-by-task basis and less formally, but being self-directed scholars they managed this mostly themselves. I only needed to provide the materials and encouragement to challenge them.

So How Did It Go?

I carried out the plan for a little over ten years in all my classes, grades seven through ten social studies. I found some interesting things. Firstly, I discovered that weaker students who chose basic proficiency in grades seven and eight mostly moved to standard inquiry by grades nine and ten. They tired of the maximum score limitations and they developed the skills to approach academics more effectively by having materials at their ability level to work on. Secondly, I discovered that some students who would be candidates for basic proficiency would sometimes choose standard inquiry if they liked the topic. The American Civil War was often one that had most people doing standard work. The effect of this was to give the weaker students confidence.

In 2012, I did a study of student progress on the plan to see whether I wished to continue it. Results were strong enough to continue the practice.

But then I could not do it anymore…

In my last year teaching social studies before retiring, I had to discontinue the program. The reasons were practical. My course assignments and rosters increased during this time period. A big disappointment for me was the loss of this extra remediation time in my schedule. I lost my remediation periods in the schedule in favor of teaching more courses (we taught six different subjects / grade levels where I worked). This showed me that modifying the work was sometimes not enough. Some students needed more time with their teacher outside of class and being denied this was a serious blow to my program. For this kind of differentiated instruction to realize its full benefit, it must be paired with some remediation time outside class even if only thirty minutes a week.

When I did a study of the work submission rates of my students during the remote learning of the pandemic, I discovered that there was a huge drop in work submission and homework completion overall starting after 2017 when my remedial class periods were cancelled. I invite the reader to return in the future and read my blog post on my experiences teaching in the pandemic. Pertinent to this discussion, the detrimental effect of eliminating extra help for my students was demonstrable over time.

I present this basic proficiency idea to the reader as a possibility they might consider for their classrooms. I found it to be a recipe for success, especially when paired with appropriate remediation. One needs to bear in mind that even when the assignments are all prepared in advance, there is a significant investment in time for management of the plan and for scoring a wider variety of assignments. Technology can help a lot with this (Like the Innovation Assessments learning platform!) but schools are advised to provide teachers who do this enough planning time and student contact time to make it happen. It is rewarding for the learner and well worth the investment.

Sample Parallel Curricula

Click here to shop my TpT store for differentiated curriculum materials for social studies grades seven through ten.