Assessment and Evaluation in Social Studies Classrooms: A Question of Balance

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What Is the State of Assessment and Evaluation in Social Studies Today?

Since public education began in Canada 150 years ago, assessment has identified and ranked students using tests, essays, and quizzes. This limited role for assessment has broadened over the past twenty years for a number of reasons: First, the goals of education in general, and social studies in particular, have greatly expanded as we attempt to help our children acquire the knowledge, skills, attitudes, and behaviours required for living in the twenty-first century. As social studies educator Joseph Kirman argues, social studies is not about the accumulation of selected facts for later recall but should aim to:

Produce a responsible person able to cope with change, capable of making reasonable decisions, who is an intelligent consumer and controller of science and technology, able to live with and appreciate human diversity, and support and defend human dignity. Such a person should be able to settle differences honorably, avoid the use of violence, be cognizant of, and active in, the stewardship of our planet, and have the skills necessary to maintain a functional economic system and democratic government.¹

This expanded view of the purposes of social studies education is reflected across the curriculum and requires a much more sophisticated approach to assessment and evaluation.² Assessment reform has also been driven by increased knowledge about learning. After decades of viewing learning as a relatively passive accumulation of facts and discrete skills, we now recognize learning as a more active process in which learners construct knowledge and make connections among facts and concepts. Innovations in recent decades, such as curriculum integration, authentic assessment, and cooperative learning, reflect these current theories.³ A third factor driving assessment and evaluation reform comes from the widespread view that traditional ways of reporting student achievement—the evaluation side of things—are not telling us what we really need to know. It is not enough to want students to learn and to express our best intentions by setting course, unit, and lesson objectives. These objectives need to be achieved. We need results: clear evidence students have met the outcomes set for them. Many provincial ministries/departments of education are responding to this concern by trying to determine standards of achievement in various subject areas, including social studies, to help make grading more accurate. Concurrent with these trends to broaden the scope of what and how to assess student progress has been a rise in large-scale, standardized assessments of various types including provincial, national, and international achievement tests.

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