I have just been grading some essay questions I assigned in my midterm exam this semester.  The questions I assigned are a new twist for me.  Rather than have students regurgitate information, I was inspired by the AP World History exam to include essays that ask students to process a set of primary sources, then answer a question with reference to them.  So far, this experiment has not been as successful as I had hoped, and I think I may have to abandon this particular type of question on my exams.  I think this for several reasons.  First, the AP Exam assumes that students have had at least a year of training in the context of history and in the process of putting even snippets of documents into that context; but in a first year World History class in college, I don’t have time to include both context and practice with primary sources in class.  Second, Because of the lack of historical context, students can only use the documents that they see – incomplete – and this results in large numbers of interpretations of documents which may in fact be reasonable given only those snippets, but are completely wrong when put in the larger context of the complete documents or of World History itself.  This, I think, encourages students to learn good writing habits, but leaves them in possession of incomplete and inaccurate historical knowledge.   Third, the time required to write this essay in class has been barely sufficient, and given the questionable gains mentioned in the first two points, above, I think that exam time could be better spent on a different kind of writing or content knowledge.  I’ll get to each of these three issues in future posts.