LEARNING-BASED ASSESSMENTS OF HISTORY UNDERSTANDING

Research undertaken to develop measures of deep understanding of American history for secondary school students serves as a method to study performance assessment in general. The assessment-policy context conditions conceptual and technical choices in design, reinforcing the importance of linking large-scale performance assessment and classroom uses. Using design perspective constraints such as desired instructional change, the state of agreement in the field of history and the practicality of assessment for wide-scale use are considered. A model of understanding adapted from Kintsch's (1992) construction-integration theory underlies the assessment. Performance differences between expert and novice explanations of primary historical sources were used as the basis of the development of a general scoring rubric. The task syntax-including a measure of prior knowledge, literal comprehension of primary texts, and an extended written explanation-has been applied to six different history topics with comparable results. Technical research is briefly summarized, including the development and validation of the scoring rubric, and its application to different history topics.