Better Assessment for Classroom History Teachers
The classroom (England)
The most important history assessments most of our students 11-18 face are public examinations. But here I want to concentrate on the assessments history teachers do to inform their own teaching and to assess their pupil’s learning – so called formative and summative assessment.
We all know the danger of old-fashioned assessment - a series of factual questions with right or wrong answers. It dates from a time when education was about a ‘body of knowledge’ and history was about learning kings, queens, and dates. We may think that those days are over. But stop to think about the assessments we set for our classes, and we may be surprised. I found many assessments I was setting depended far more than I had realised on rote learning and memory. Without memorising the information, students could not attempt the essays. What looked like questions about historical sources in fact depended very heavily on what students did or did not know. What I was testing was primarily memory and secondarily the ability to write and structure prose. Skill as historians came a distant third.
Museums Victoria, 1940s classroom
To assess historical skills, we must identify and teach them separately first. We have, for example, to teach inference, sequence, cause, and source separately, and set up methods our students should use for each. Only then is it possible to evaluate each skill quite specifically. Similarly, we can break down the process that goes into writing an essay. The question needs to be understood and the correct essay structure used. Then the different elements of the argument need identifying, putting in order, and linking. Introduction (however brief, perhaps only a sentence) and paragraphs have to be properly constructed. Finally, there must be a conclusion that follows from the material that has come before and clearly answers the question. Each of these stages can be taught and can then be separately assessed.
Let me give an example. Instead of asking a year 8 class to write a short essay on ‘why did Henry VIII change the English Church?’ we might provide them a list of causes they have studied. He needed money. He wanted more power. He was influenced by Thomas Cromwell. He wanted to marry Anne Boleyn. He wanted to end the Spanish alliance which had always been maintained by Catherine of Aragon. We could go on and add many more. A simple test would be to give these (and even perhaps some fake ones, for example that he was a committed Protestant) and ask our students to sort out good from bad. They could place them in sequential order (quite difficult, in fact). They could put them in order of importance; they could then explain their decisions. We could challenge them to identify ‘possible’, ‘probable’ and ‘trigger’ causes, or suggest some other system of categorisation. We could get them to draw up a diagram – I taught my students a ‘causes tree’ - showing which causes led to which others. And so on. In each case we are specifically testing understanding, sequencing, and cause; we are not confusing the issue with memory or writing prose.
Once we have had a little practice in setting this kind of assessment, we can begin to differentiate assessments by ability. Using the same given information, the least able can simply highlight relevant text while the most able can write a formal essay. In between there are many other possible routes, for example, making lists and drawing diagrams, or making an essay plan. Students can be encouraged, when starting the test, to choose the appropriate level – though that is admittedly easier in a school with streamed sets than in one with mixed ability. A single mark scheme can extend from the simplest response to the most complex. Now we have created a unified, standard assessment that can establish achievement against clear criteria across an entire year group.
Take a look at your assessments and ask if what you are demanding depends too much on memory or the ability to write English prose. After all, no practising historian works from memory. And writing English is not your main priority – leave that to the English department. Ask whether you have identified skills that historians actually use, and then see whether your assessment isolates and tests them.
Dr Jon Rosebank is Fellow of New College, Oxford; Executive Producer BBC Documentaries and History; Head of History 11-18; writer (but not more than one of these at any time.) Now writer and presenter of History Café, revisiting historical episodes and making scholarship accessible on all podcast platforms.
References and Resources:
Jon Rosebank, ‘Encouraging individual learning in classroom history’, How-to History (2024)
Teaching for beginners / Historical Association (history.org.uk)
 | A guest post by
|
Interesting points. I did have assessments like the ones you described from high school and throughout university. I was, admittedly lucky. Ive seen lots of efforts to try to have students engage with materials in ways that further their ability to use the heuristics historians use.
However, I do think all historians do work from memory. I suppose it really depends what we mean by memory and that my point is less a disagreement and more a reflection that I take a wider view of what memory is. I think that professional historians have a lot of content in their heads (even if they go back and check for specific dates) but that content is memory. Focusing solely on skills makes it challenging for students to use of skills because these inevitably rely on memory. Evaluating sources requires knowing the context so one knows what to ask.