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"Crusades and Black Death": Regents Global 9 CRQ + Video Lessons

Two primary-source document sets on the First Crusade and the Black Death anchor this Regents-style constructed-response packet, pairing student and teacher editions with a PLD-based scoring rubric and six video-lesson passcodes.
Grades
Grades 9–10, High School
File type
Multiple File Types

Updated Aug 08, 2023

Subject
Social Studies, History, History: World
Topic
new york state regents, global history and geography
Resource types
Teacher Tools, Assessments, Tests

About this resource

What's inside this resource

Regents Global 9 CRQ "Crusades and Black Death" + Video Lessons

This product is a constructed-response question (“CRQ”) in the format of the new New York State Regents examination in Global History and Geography. 

The CRQ calls upon the student to examine historical sources (I use exclusively primary sources) by providing historical or geographic context, identifying the point of view, intended audience, or purpose of a document and then using the two documents in either compare-contrast, cause-effect analysis, or turning point identification. I advocate a strategy of assigning one CRQ in each unit of study in grades nine and ten without access to notes. I used this as one of the tests at the end of a unit of study. I would tell students about what kinds of documents would appear and what historical context they should be able to recall in advance. It is a challenging task for them. 

The first challenge for novices is to understand what it means to provide context. Faced with the question “What is the historical context of this document?”, beginners will retell what the document says. The reason for this mistake is that, since they were little kids, teachers have asked them to relate what a text means to prove they understood it.  [Read more at the Innovation blog]

Product includes:

1. Student version

2. Teacher version with suggested answers

3. Passcode to video lessons students can use to prepare the task.


Documents:

  1. map, first Crusade

  2. Excerpt is from the Gesta Francorum ("The Deeds of the Franks"). It is a Latin chronicle of the First Crusade written in circa 1100-1101.

  3. map, Bubonic plague

  4. excerpt, The Decameron


Passcode Lessons:

  • Transregional Trade networks

  • Overview of The Crusades

  • The past, present and future of the bubonic plague

  • 9.7 Word Bank Matching

  • The Black Death

  • Medieval Travellers


About Innovation Passcodes

Passcodes let your students access selected lessons in my own virtual classroom at InnovationAssessments.com. No registration is required. Use the codes at InnovationAssessments.com/TestDrive.

In the classroom

Teaching tips & learning objectives

Learning objectives

  • Establish the historical and geographic context of a primary-source document using outside background knowledge, not just its stated content.

  • Evaluate a primary source's point of view, purpose, and reliability by identifying its authorship, format, and intended audience.

  • Identify a historical turning point and explain its significance using evidence drawn from two related documents.

Teaching tips

  • Use the included PLD-based rubric (pages 2-3) to convert student CRQ responses into a 100-point classroom grade, since the actual Regents exam only awards pass/fail credit per response and does not distinguish quality of reasoning.

  • Assign the Crusades and Black Death sets as two separate end-of-unit tasks rather than back-to-back, since each pairs with a different unit's framework reference (9.6a for the Crusades, 9.6b for the Black Death).

Skills covered

  • Historical contextualization -- students place the First Crusade and the Black Death in time and place using a map and outside background knowledge, not just the document's own content (pages 6, 13, 19, 24).

  • Primary-source reliability evaluation -- students judge the point of view, purpose, and authorship of the Gesta Francorum chronicle and a Decameron excerpt (pages 8, 15, 21, 26).

  • Turning-point argumentation -- students identify a historical turning point and explain it with evidence drawn from two documents at once (pages 10, 17, 22, 27).

Good to know

Questions teachers ask about this resource

How does this CRQ's scoring differ from the actual Regents exam?

The teacher's edition includes a performance-level-descriptor rubric (pages 2-3) that turns each response into a graded score on a 100-point scale, useful for classroom grading -- the real Regents exam only awards one credit or zero per response, with no partial credit.

What primary sources do students analyze?

The Crusades set uses a map of the First Crusade and an excerpt from the Gesta Francorum, an eyewitness Latin chronicle; the Black Death set uses a map of the plague's spread and an excerpt from Boccaccio's Decameron.

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Curriculum

Standards, concepts & topics

Standards

  • CCSS.RI.9.1 — Cite strong and thorough textual evidence to support analysis of what the text says explicitly as well as inferences drawn from the text.
  • CCSS.RI.9.6 — Determine an author’s point of view or purpose in a text and analyze how an author uses rhetoric to advance that point of view or purpose.

Core concepts

  • Constructed-response question (CRQ)

  • Primary source analysis

  • Historical context

  • Source reliability

  • Turning point

  • The Crusades

  • The Black Death

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