US History Regents Short Essay "Reconstruction No. 3" + Video Lessons

US History Regents Short Essay "Reconstruction No. 3" + Video Lessons

The repeated and continuing challenge of the United States is to incorporate citizens in a multi-ethnic nation-state. In the aftermath of the Civil War, the challenge of integrating former slaves in the south was met. In the west in the late 19th century, in was addressing the presence of native peoples whose presence predated white Americans.

This product is a short essay task in the format of the new New York State Regents examination in US History and Government. 

The updated New York State Regents examination in United States History and Government, part II, is a short essay task designed to measure students’ ability to work with historic documents. It is a mature version of the “CRQ” found on the tenth grade Global Regents. Students are called upon to understand text, engage it with historical context, and assess a text’s reliability.

In document set 1, students describe the historical context surrounding two documents and identify and explain the relationship between the events and/or ideas found in those documents (Cause/Effect or Similarity/Difference or Turning Point).

Document set 2 asks students to describe the historical context surrounding two documents and (for one identified document) analyze and explain how audience, or purpose, or bias, or point of view affects the document’s use as a reliable source of evidence. [Read more about teaching this at the Innovation blog]

If you are afraid to assign your students this as a test because they are not likely to do well at first and don’t want to bother their GPA, I recommend using standardized scoring. You can use the z-score calculator here at Innovation Assessments. Use 78 as your standard mean and 14.8 as your standardized standard deviation. Read more about standardized scoring here and where I got those figures. The beauty of this system is you can apply this to their grades every month and as the class improves, as the class average approaches the standardized mean (78 in this case), then the algorithm affects their scores less and less.

This product includes:

• Set 1, 2 documents

• Set 2, 2 documents

• Scoring rubric

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

For an extensive collection of similarly designed resources, visit my store here!

Documents:

An excerpt from the Semi-annual report on schools for freedom, 1866. 

Newspaper Article in the Richmond planet, 15 September 1900, Page 8 

Homestead Certificate for Daniel Freeman, 20 January 1868 

Before and After Photos of Native American Students at the Carlisle Indian School From the Late 19th Century 

Passcode Lessons:

• Intro to Reconstruction

• The American Presidential Election of 1876

• Native Americans Struggle to Survive

• Populating the West

• Native Americans, late 19th Cen. (14m)] 

• Reform Movements part 1

• Reform Movements part 2

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.

Subscribers to Innovation can use a passcode to import the entire task into their own test question bank. There is no charge for subscribing to Innovation.

Read more about Innovation passcodes at the blog here.