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Education, Innovation and Discovery: The Distinctive Promise of the American Research University

Assessing Learning in the Humanities: Using "Decoding the Disciplines" to Set Authentic Goals and Measure Achievement in Writing, Speaking and Understanding

Leaders: Joan Middendorf, Associate Director of Campus Instructional Consulting Center and Adjunct Professor in Higher Education and Student Affairs, Indiana University, Bloomington
Leah Shopkow, Associate Professor of History, Indiana University Bloomington

Recorder: Kellie Montoya

Presentation:

Professor Middendorf and Professor Shopkow are two members of a four-person research team in History using Decoding the Disciplines, a seven-step methodology intended to uncover and address places where students become “stuck” in their learning. The team interviewed twenty-three members of the History Department at Indiana University to uncover these "stuck places." Every professor interviewed could mention at least one bottleneck to student learning. For example, students misunderstand the nature of the historical discipline, believing it primarily to require only memorization, not analysis or interpretation. Session attendees were shown portions of some of these interviews and in subsequent discussion agreed that their own disciplines presented similar kinds of challenges to students.

The key to helping students negotiate learning difficulties is to identify what experts do to negotiate bottlenecks (the second step of Decoding the Disciplines). In history, students need to look at maps, learn to understand symbols, and embrace the culture. Students need to learn to think historically. Expert thinking needs first to be identified and then modeled explicitly for the students. It is important to remember that what seems transparent and obvious to an expert can be opaque to students because it operates at the level of tacit knowledge for the instructor. Once the desired thinking is identified, the instructor can model the thinking (step 3) and determine which evidence might show that students were engaging in this kind of thinking: It then becomes possible to design focused authentic assessments to reveal how well the students have mastered this sort of thinking (step 6). Session attendees looked at a number of assessments, which included: 1) a sample question from a global assessment given to about 1,600 history students asking how students dealt with conflicting sources; 2) an exercise in which students were asked to compare campaign advertisements from elections thirty years apart to see how well they were able to interpret these primary sources; 3) an exercise in which students were asked to draw the features of the character Beowulf that would be important to the Anglo-Saxon audience to see how well they had grasped the concept of audience; 4) a metacognitive exercise in which students wrote a letter giving advice on how to succeed in a history course; and 5) a presentation rubric.

Session attendees pointed out that formal considerations also need to be taken into account. Some of their recommendations included the use of case studies and the requirement of certain prerequisite courses, for example, philosophy of history or a methods course. The presenters also suggested that curriculum in history, at least, needs to be rethought to reflect cognitive development along the lines laid out by Perry et al., so that students in lower-level courses would acquire lower-level skills (recognition, recollection) and advance to more sophisticated ones (analysis, synthesis). Finally, faculty within departments, and departments within institutions, need to share information from their assessments. This sharing will help practitioners convey the complexity of the discipline to the students and further help students by bringing only the best practices into the classroom. Surveys are excellent tools because they provide general information and a snapshot across the department. They separate historical thinking and cognitive skills from content knowledge, measure where students begin in an individual class and their individual progress, and show the composition of classes. Assessment and instruction are not separate because many assessments are formative. Furthermore, in authentic assessment, form must follow function; that is, assessment has to be shaped by the skills the professors want the students to learn. By focusing on the bottlenecks, by modeling skills, and by designing authentic assessments, the bottlenecks can be turned into opportunities for research into student learning within the disciplines.

Recommendations:

Use case studies as part of the history curriculum.
Require students to take philosophy of history, or a similar methods prerequisite course as part of the history curriculum.
Faculty should share information from their assessments within departments and within the institution.

References:

PowerPoint Presentation