What Do You
- standards before rating student work
- specific content and skills to be
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What Do You Wish to
measure many areas including:
the effect of a historical
event on a particular place or time.
which economic system (market, command, traditional) was most effective at
answering basic economic questions.
Compare and contrast the
effects of nationalism on different societies throughout global history.
Consider the effect of imperialism
on different nations from the multiple perspectives of imperialists and
Fuse documents into an
integrated essay by grouping or categorizing them into an analytical
framework (documents should not merely be paraphrased or listed randomly).
Incorporate relevant outside
information to support the main idea or thesis of the essay.
Utilize sufficient facts,
examples, reasons, and details in the body of the paper.
Write a strong introductory
paragraph that provides a pathway into the response. This pathway will
provide definitions, historical background, and a thesis or main idea
Organize the essay into multiple
paragraphs that support the main idea or thesis.
Support the main idea or thesis
with relevant facts, examples, and details.
Construct a strong concluding
paragraph that restates the thesis or main idea and summarizes key points made in
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- To ensure that students know what
constitutes quality work, they need to know specifically how they are
- Provide students with exemplars
(actual examples of outstanding student work) to help them determine what
they need to do to craft an exemplary response.
- Provide students with a
copy of the
generic scoring rubric prior to responding to the question. Providing
a generic rubric makes the standards
and expectations clear to students.
- The New York State Education
scoring rubrics that form the basic for rubrics constructed for
specific DBQ essays on each State social studies assessment. Make an
age/grade appropriate rubric
available to all students at the start of the school year.
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In order to prepare students
for DBQ essay writing, the rating process for local classroom assessments
can contain many of the procedures used in
the rating of State assessments. Try implementing some of these rating principles when devising unit tests,
quarterly exams, semester exams, and school final exams:
- Provide a generic rubric to students to
make very clear the standards for writing quality DBQs.
- Devise rubrics specific
to the DBQ individually or department-wide, discuss standards and student
work, compare grading, and double-rate papers (if feasible).
- Select exemplar papers
(also known as anchor papers on State assessments) as instructional papers
for students and benchmark papers for teachers,
exemplifying a particular scoring point on the rubric.
- Give students an
opportunity, individually or in groups, to reflect upon their work by
focusing on improving performance.
Monitor, adjust, revise, and/or reassess the quality of questions and
rubrics. This action helps ensure that all students are offered an
opportunity to demonstrate what they know and can do with social studies
skills and content.
Before final grading, practice scoring
sample essays to ensure consistent application of the specific scoring
Below is the specific scoring rubric for use with the
Sample DBQ, along with two sets of practice
Content-Specific Scoring Rubric (PDF Version)
Practice Papers - Set 1
Practice Papers - Set 2
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goal of any scoring session should be to achieve consistent and accurate
scores. When scoring papers in groups, this means not simply to have everyone assign the same scores, but to assign
them for the right reasons.
Holistic Scoring in Social Studies is a PowerPoint presentation that
explains the group scoring process for State assessments further. Many of
the ideas contained here can be adapted to small group or individual essay
scoring on local classroom assessments.
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II title page