My last post was about Common Core, and this one will be about an assessment my students did with our student teacher this week, and how that could look under some models of Common Core that have been pushed forward.

Students were reading The Coming of the Long Knives from “Sing Down the Moon” by Scott O’Dell about the removal of the Navajo (spelled Navaho in this story) from Canyon De Chelly to Bosque Redondo (Fort Sumner). It was a short constructed response question asking the students why are the Long Knives (U.S. Cavalry soldiers) taking the Navajos away from their homes? The students needed to write 3-5 sentences to answer the question.

Some of the students who focused on just the facts came up with the idea that the soldiers wanted them to starve, not understanding that this was a tactic, not the end game. Most students got that this was a land grab and the U.S. wanted to take the Navajo’s land, but here is where it got interesting. Many students included an idea from outside that story.

In addition to reading the story, the student teacher showed them a video from National Geographics, The Story of Us series on westward expansion.  There is a very interesting part in the video where an American Indian historian says that whites were never able to see Indians as part America in their vision of what the country would be. This is a really big idea for fifth graders, and ties in with earlier reading and discussions we’ve had about how slaves were compartmentalized as “non-humans” so that they could be treated as property and not given the rights that “all men” were endowed with under the Constitution (actually under natural law, the Constitution just codifies it).

Many students included the idea that the U.S. soldiers wanted their land, because they didn’t think of the Navaho’s as American so they could take it away. This would take a really high level of inference on the part of eleven year olds if they had just read the story. Since they were “told” this in the documentary, and did not have to read between the lines of the story. Citing it is not as “high level” as if they came to this on their own from the text, BUT being able to connect the idea from the documentary to the story they were reading does involve synthesis and is a critical skill in understanding social studies materials.

IF Common Core does not allow for bringing in out of text knowledge, if the tests are scored by machines that will only count “facts” from the passages that are given, these kids would have failed in the assignment when what they did was go beyond what was asked.

Photo Credit: 33 by chrisinplymouth, on Flickr