Assessments in Social Studies

Assessments in Social Studies

As in every subject taught in school, assessments are essential tools that should be used to determine what your students now know or don't know. Implementing an assessment into every lesson is vital because if you as the teacher don't have an opportunity to see what your students learned, how will you appropriately move on to the next lesson? When one thinks of an assessment, they usually think of some form of test. Commonly, at the end of a chapter or lesson, the teacher will give a test: multiple choice, true/false, short answer, etc. If you are an insightful teacher, you may think that this is the only form of assessment that is effective; but this is in fact not true. Using a routine test as your form of assessment is actually the furthest thing from the most accurate form of assessing your students knowledge. Giving a test can cause many problems: test anxiety being a big one.

Social Studies is fun, therefore the assessments used in this topic should be fun as well. Since assessing knowledge is just as important as the lesson itself, it should be just as engaging and interesting. During the lesson, instead of reading from a textbook, you could assign roles and act out what is being taught. Then, for the assessment you could have the students break into groups and create a poster and present it to the rest of the class. This allows communication between peers, out-of-the-box thinking, collaboration, and presentation of knowledge. Using this method of assessment not only shows you what the students genuinely learned from the lesson, but they don't even realize they are being assessed: it takes the pressure off. Assessments in every topic are important, but assessments in social studies can be particularly fun. Being a hands-on, engaging, and likable teacher means you should never used a test as a form of assessment with you students unless absolute necessary!