Critical Review -- Creative Assessment

“Redrawing the Renaissance”
Matt Stanford. Teaching History, Mar2008 Issue 130, p. 4-11

Assessment in the social studies classroom is usually straight forward. History teachers sort through and assess essays, tests, and perhaps the odd group project. The sad fact is that assessment in the social studies classroom usually relies on words – both written and spoken. This method, however, will obviously become boring and a bit tedious for both teacher and students. Plus, it is obvious that not all our students will be able to successfully transfer their ideas out onto paper. But how else could a teacher assess their classroom without grading written work? This question has been quite troubling for me, especially because it does not seem to be addressed much in our program. Luckily, I came across an article in Teaching History which looked at how to effectively place creative assessment in the social studies classroom. Grade seven history teacher, Matt Stanford, suggests that we can assess students’ historical understanding successfully through art.

The idea to assess using creative works instead of written or spoken word came when Stanford looked through the changes made to the British PLOs this year. Instead of being concerned with dates, identification of cultural trends and technology, the new version required students to have “a sense” of period as well as “a feeling” for its characteristic features. This simple change gave Stanford and his colleagues the room they needed to take their classroom assessment to the next level. They decided to use a creative mode of assessment while working through their up-in-coming Renaissance unit. In this unit, Stanford and his colleagues wanted their students to explicitly and implicitly draw links between the different cultural features of the Renaissance period as well as to “build and reinforce a flavour of what the Renaissance stands for” (p.6). To assess this understanding, the students were asked to create a piece of art which represented the changes in thinking that took place during the period.

In order to prepare the class for such a task, Stanford taught his students about the period and changes which took place during the Renaissance and provided them with a large amount of materials and references. While this helped the students begin to process the main ideas of the period, it obviously would not help them fully create a piece of art that could represent the cultural ideas in a Renaissance painting. Stanford then began to scaffold the project for his students, proving a tutorial on perspective for them as well helping to focus their ideas by getting the students to pick words and phrases from a list that best summed up the period. I believe that this was essential to the success of the project. If a teacher only showed their students several pieces of Renaissance art, the class would not get a full understanding of what the period stood for. Further more the assessment of the project would become corrupted – students would simply copy the symbols and techniques placed in front of them without holding the knowledge of why they were placing these pieces into their project. It is important to provide your students with enough information and scaffolding so that they may go through a process of selection and rejection to pick out the best ideas and techniques that fully represent the Renaissance.

Many could become sceptical of replacing a tried and true type of assessment with one that is untested and ‘creative’. This creative way of assessing, however, may assess a student’s knowledge more creditably. I believe that this may give students who are usually weak in writing and speaking a proper outlet to which they may be able to fully represent their knowledge and ideas. This is an incredibly important idea for me, especially because I am currently working with a classroom that has a high level of illiteracy and a low level of comprehension. This way of assessment may also allow out students to think as historians. As Stanford points out, “we [historians] all have our lists of items that, for you, sum up a historical period, idea or concept” (p.6). When historians think of a period or culture in time, we do not think in words – we instead think of symbols, faces, ideas, and cultural artifacts all of which represent some piece of the period. It is not until we are able to put all these pieces together when we can get a full picture of what the historical was like. Why not, then, put these images and ideas down in paper instead of the written word? I believe that Stanford’s article represents a more natural form of assessment for the social studies classroom that will make both the teacher and student feel comfortable with the subject matter.