US History Regents Short Essay "The Great War" + Video Lessons

This product is a short essay task in the format of the new New York State Regents examination in US History and Government. It’s great to do one of these each unit, so I have organized them by

time period.

For additional resources in US and Global history, please visit my store here!

Woodrow Wilson ran for president on an anti-war platform, reflecting the resistance of Americans to become involved in the war in Europe that would become the first world war. Always the scholar, he could not escape the conclusion that the United States must intervene in the war. Whether all of us today would agree with that conclusion is a matter of some debate. Wilson knew what he was getting into; knew how a war footing would change the nation.

Document set 1: describe the historical context; 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: describe the historical context;  analyze the reliability of one source. [Read more about teaching this at the Innovation blog]

If you are concerned about assigning 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.

Product includes:

• Set 1, 2 documents

• Set 2, 2 documents

• Scoring rubric

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

Documents:

Excerpt from an interview with President Wilson before the US declared war

Alfred Balfour's speech to Parliament, 1918

Excerpt, Henry Cabot Lodge debates the Treaty of Versailles, 1919

Photo, women in munitions factory, ca. 1916

Passcode Lessons:

• Imperialism part 1 (13m)

• Imperialism part 2 (14m)

• Imperialism part 3 (11min)

• pt. 1 World War I

• pt. 2 World War I

• Propaganda in the Great War (World War I)

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.