ABSTRACTAlthough most teachers adapt curriculum, we know little about teachers’ rationales for modifying materials, how these rationales align with actual modifications, nor whether any patterns exist in the modifications that teachers make. This is especially the case in history/social studies, where research on curriculum is scant and research on teacher adaptation of curriculum is virtually non-existent. This paper addresses that gap. We report the results of a large-scale survey on curriculu...
AbstractThis article reports a validity study of History Assessments of Thinking (HATs), which are short, constructed-response assessments of historical thinking. In particular, this study focuses ...
AbstractTo be an informed citizen in today’s information-rich environment, individuals must be able to evaluate information they encounter on the Internet. However, teachers currently have limited options if they want to assess students’ evaluations of digital content. In response, we created a range of short tasks that assess students’ civic online reasoning—the ability to effectively search for, evaluate, and verify social and political information online. Assessments ranged from paper-and-pen...
In recent years — and especially since the 2016 presidential election — numerous media organizations, newspapers, and policy advocates have made efforts to help Americans become more careful consum...
The Stanford History Education Group has prototyped, field tested, and validated a bank of assessments that tap civic online reasoning—the ability to judge the credibility of the information that floods young people’s smartphones, tablets, and computers. We developed 56 tasks and administered them to students across 12 states. In total, we collected and analyzed 7,804 student responses. From pre-teens to seniors in college, students struggled mightily to evaluate online information. To investiga...
AbstractThis article considers the design process for new formative history assessments. Over the course of 3 years, my colleagues from the Stanford History Education Group and I designed, piloted, and revised dozens of History Assessments of Thinking (HATs). As we created HATs, we sought to gather information about their cognitive validity, the relationship between the constructs targeted by the assessments, and the cognitive processes students used to answer them. Three case studies trace the ...