Reply to MCPS "Progress Checks" and "Common Writing Tasks" instead of RQAs and Unit Tests

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Reply to "MCPS "Progress Checks" and "Common Writing Tasks" instead of RQAs and Unit Tests"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I hate DBQ's.  It's a way if making history fact free.  All you need to answer the essay is in the documents - no actual hisorical facts.  For example, in 7th grade World Studies, you have to know what cultural dissemination is and be able to pock an example out of the documents, but you do not have to have any knowledge yourself about different cultures in history and how they disseminated across the globe.

Often the reading level of the MCPS DBQ is not commensurate with the reading level of the grade or student.  The documents are so fragmentary that often kids have to make shit up to fill in the gaps enough to create a sensible essay.[/quote]

Do you mean cultural diffusion?

Also, students don't write that DBQ until they've already learned facts about Mali from many sources other than the documents. I can't tell if you are a teacher or a parent, but you clearly don't know this particular assessment very well.[/quote]

Parent.  I know it well.  I looked much more closely at the assignment when DC came to me crying that he couldn't write the essay.  DS had almost no info on Mali or any other culture.  His entire WS semester consisted of about 10 pages of handouts, most of which was on either the Aztecs or Incas.  The info they got on Mali was from a trade simulation exercise, and was really not linked to any real factual knowledge, but rather an exercise in - "what if you had some horses and the guy from the next country over had some jewels, what might you do?". Answer was clearly supposed to be trade and then posit what effect an increase in horses might have on the country who bought them.   I say posit because there was no actual factual information about how influx of horses or other means of transportation changed in an actual real life country.   Maybe we just had a bad teacher who didnmt provide any materials.

Yes, I understand history comes from documents and artifacts, but we don't insist that students of history examine every original document proving every fact in history.  These kids in 7th grade WS are presented "documents" that are maybe 5-10 sentences and represent a very fragmentary understanding of a culture and period in history.  MCPS history has completely switched out a focus on process and analysis for any time spent on actually learning a survey of what happened in history.

As for AP (and the DBQ), it does focus students on finding support in the text for your arguments, which is good, but our experience was that there was almost no real writing instruction in how to construct paragraphs and absolutely no feedback on essays other than a numerical grade.  [/quote]

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