Alternatives to Traditional Exams: Getting Students to Do History

For years, I have dreaded giving exams probably as much as my students dreaded taking them. The need to cover content was represented by multiple choice or short answer questions, and students were given an opportunity to demonstrate historical analysis through in-class essays. However, particularly in a community college environment, many students face significant challenges to performing well on traditional exams – lack of test-taking skills, difficulty prioritizing “Important” facts over minor details, English as a second language. More importantly, my participation in a variety of conferences and workshops on teaching history, including participation in the AHA Tuning Project, pushed me to question whether exams were giving students the opportunity to engage with the discipline, to actually “think like a historian.” Even A and B level essays frequently did not demonstrate the level of historical thinking I hoped to cultivate in my students. So, beginning Fall 2017, I revamped my introductory courses to eliminate traditional tests and instead focus on getting my students to do history. For example, as a final assessment, students create a “presenting history” project that requires them to think about how historians present historical information to the public. This assignment requires them to produce a historical project alongside a process paper that outlines their decision-making process. In this presentation, I will share some of my assignments, alongside some of the challenges, in implementing alternatives to traditional tests in the classroom.