Formative Assessment Using Library of Congress Documents

In searching for alternatives to multiple choice tests and DBQs, we were inspired by the common practice of “do-nows” (also known as “bell work”) in which teachers give students a brief task at the beginning of class to prepare them for the day’s lesson. Could these minutes at the start of class be used for formative assessment?

With support from the Library of Congress, we set out to create tasks that would give social studies teachers new options. Our exercises are built around primary sources from the Library’s extensive collection. Each exercise assesses core skills of historical thinking and provides teachers with quick feedback about student understanding. All of our tasks, which we call History Assessments of Thinking (HATs), can be completed in less than ten minutes, some in less than five. They require students to evaluate a source and to write a few sentences to explain their reasoning about it. Even short answers, we have learned, tell us a great deal about student thinking.