us history research paper rubric

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The Research Paper

In an effort to gain a better understanding of a significant event in American History, all PHS students enrolled in U.S. History are required to write a formal research paper as part of the course. Students will choose a topic of their own interest with approval from their teacher.

• Topics must be between the years 1875 and 1960 . 
• Your topic should look at an American problem, significant event, or controversial subject.   However, the topic must be limited enough to thoroughly examine within the required word count. Therefore, a topic such as World War II is too broad in scope, while an examination of a particular aspect such as whether or not the US was justified in dropping the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki would be more appropriate.
• Ample time will be provided for research, construction of an outline, forming a rough draft, and submitting a final copy.  See the research paper rubric for assessment categories; papers will be graded using this rubric .

Just remember, research takes time . Follow the steps one by one and meet deadlines along the way...you will be successful.

Develop a research plan

The most time consuming part of any research project is the research. Plan your time wisely. Some 70-80% of your time should be devoted to reading and research so you thoroughly understand your subject.   The remaining time is for writing. However,  do not leave writing of the last minute.  Remember, if you leave printing o the last minute, there are bound to be printer problems!

Develop your research topic.

What are the key concepts of your topic?  Can you broaden or narrow your focus? Consider focusing on one or more of the following:

• time period
• specific event   
• specific people

Does your topic overlap other subject areas such as anthropology, geography or political science?

Think of 2- 3 questions that you will need to explore.

• Think about the history of your topic, and its categories.
• Who are the key people? What did they do? Why did it happen?

Under each question, think about the following aspects:

• What do you already know about your topic or issue?
• What do you need to learn to better understand your topic or issue?
• What kind of information resource might provide the answer to these questions?

Consider your audience.

• Who will read your paper?
• Why will it be of interest to them?
• What will be new to them?

Subject Guide

Assignment & Rubric

• Research Paper Guidelines
• Research Paper Scoring Guidelines
• Research Paper Rubric
• Peer Review Checklist
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• Last Updated: Oct 31, 2023 10:19 AM
• URL: https://phspatriots.libguides.com/USpaper

Eberly Center

Teaching excellence & educational innovation, grading and performance rubrics, what are rubrics.

A rubric is a scoring tool that explicitly represents the performance expectations for an assignment or piece of work. A rubric divides the assigned work into component parts and provides clear descriptions of the characteristics of the work associated with each component, at varying levels of mastery. Rubrics can be used for a wide array of assignments: papers, projects, oral presentations, artistic performances, group projects, etc. Rubrics can be used as scoring or grading guides, to provide formative feedback to support and guide ongoing learning efforts, or both.

Advantages of Using Rubrics

Using a rubric provides several advantages to both instructors and students. Grading according to an explicit and descriptive set of criteria that is designed to reflect the weighted importance of the objectives of the assignment helps ensure that the instructor’s grading standards don’t change over time. Grading consistency is difficult to maintain over time because of fatigue, shifting standards based on prior experience, or intrusion of other criteria. Furthermore, rubrics can reduce the time spent grading by reducing uncertainty and by allowing instructors to refer to the rubric description associated with a score rather than having to write long comments. Finally, grading rubrics are invaluable in large courses that have multiple graders (other instructors, teaching assistants, etc.) because they can help ensure consistency across graders and reduce the systematic bias that can be introduced between graders.

Used more formatively, rubrics can help instructors get a clearer picture of the strengths and weaknesses of their class. By recording the component scores and tallying up the number of students scoring below an acceptable level on each component, instructors can identify those skills or concepts that need more instructional time and student effort.

Grading rubrics are also valuable to students. A rubric can help instructors communicate to students the specific requirements and acceptable performance standards of an assignment. When rubrics are given to students with the assignment description, they can help students monitor and assess their progress as they work toward clearly indicated goals. When assignments are scored and returned with the rubric, students can more easily recognize the strengths and weaknesses of their work and direct their efforts accordingly.

Examples of Rubrics

Here are links to a diverse set of rubrics designed by Carnegie Mellon faculty and faculty at other institutions. Although your particular field of study and type of assessment activity may not be represented currently, viewing a rubric that is designed for a similar activity may provide you with ideas on how to divide your task into components and how to describe the varying levels of mastery.

Paper Assignments

• Example 1: Philosophy Paper This rubric was designed for student papers in a range of philosophy courses, CMU.
• Example 2: Psychology Assignment Short, concept application homework assignment in cognitive psychology, CMU.
• Example 3: Anthropology Writing Assignments This rubric was designed for a series of short writing assignments in anthropology, CMU.
• Example 4: History Research Paper . This rubric was designed for essays and research papers in history, CMU.
• Example 1: Capstone Project in Design This rubric describes the components and standard of performance from the research phase to the final presentation for a senior capstone project in the School of Design, CMU.
• Example 2: Engineering Design Project This rubric describes performance standards on three aspects of a team project: Research and Design, Communication, and Team Work.

Oral Presentations

• Example 1: Oral Exam This rubric describes a set of components and standards for assessing performance on an oral exam in an upper-division history course, CMU.
• Example 2: Oral Communication
• Example 3: Group Presentations This rubric describes a set of components and standards for assessing group presentations in a history course, CMU.

Class Participation/Contributions

• Example 1: Discussion Class This rubric assesses the quality of student contributions to class discussions. This is appropriate for an undergraduate-level course, CMU.
• Example 2: Advanced Seminar This rubric is designed for assessing discussion performance in an advanced undergraduate or graduate seminar. 

Rubrics for History Courses: Lessons from One Campus

Daniel J. McInerney | Oct 1, 2010

Noralee Frankel, AHA’s assistant director for teaching, writes: Whenever a question on learning outcomes is asked on the AHA’s listserve for department chairs, we always receive a vigorous response. In March 2008, Gabrielle Spiegel, then AHA president, wrote about the need to take assessment seriously in her Perspectives on History article, “ A Triple ‘A’ Threat: Accountability, Assessment, Accreditation .” In March 2009 Perspectives on History published a forum on assessment . This article, and the one by Marianne S. Wokeck , on the Lumina Foundation’s Tuning Project are offered to help departments struggling with the challenges of assessing student outcomes.

It took me only a couple of semesters as a new university instructor to figure out that office hours were taken up largely with students asking variations of two common (and reasonable) questions: “What does it take to do well on class exercises?”; and, “What should I get out of the course as a whole?”

It took me only a couple of more decades to figure out a way of answering the questions in a form that was straightforward, transparent, and related to larger disciplinary issues outside a single class. The tools that colleagues and I developed in Utah State University’s History Department were “rubrics,” scoring guides that help clarify how instructors evaluate tasks within a course—and how the evaluations tie into the broader goals of the history major.

There is nothing remarkable about rubrics themselves. What instructor has not weighed the standards, criteria, and expectations that will guide the work within a course? Some might assume that students should simply enter a class with the understanding that they will be pushed to excel. Others may prefer to use lengthy comments written on exams and papers to explain how a student’s analysis might be refined, redirected, or thoroughly revamped. Still others might hope that a few sketchy remarks along with a grade will goad inquisitive students to stop by for office visits and fruitful discussions of their performance.

A rubric does not substitute for high standards, thoughtful comments, and engaged conversations; instead, it offers a way to prepare students for course exercises and guides the discussions they may choose to have about their work. The rubric explains in advance why a course exercise exists at all, stating the goals an instructor has established for the task, the criteria that will structure the effort, and the means of measuring a student’s performance. But in order to write up such statements, instructors have to be aware of their own objectives and intentions, thinking carefully and systematically about what they want their class to achieve. Course goals cannot “go without saying”; they must be articulated. A rubric aims to make the instructor’s purposes as transparent as the student’s responsibilities.

Some may try to develop rubrics on their own, as a way of laying out a broader set of academic principles to students, as a means of clarifying the conventions of a discipline, or (as in my own case) simply answering in advance the questions that would inevitably and repeatedly come up in office visits. Years ago, in an early set of “evaluation scales,” I outlined for students “what counted” on exams and term papers. The grade on an essay exam reflected the pertinence, accuracy, organization, and explanation offered in the student’s response. The evaluation of a term paper grew out of its informing thesis as well as the reasoning, organization, conclusion, substantiation, and mechanics of the argument. 1 Perhaps the “scales” offered students some guidance, but they failed to define different levels of mastery in each of the categories and only indirectly pointed to expectations in the discipline rather than a single course.

Rather than revising the “evaluation scales” as an individual project for my own course assignments, the next step came in a collective project with fellow faculty members. Beginning in the spring semester of 2009, the history department at Utah State University became part of a broader and more ambitious project of assessment on all nine campuses in the Utah System of Higher Education (USHE). The USHE received a grant from the Lumina Foundation for Education to work along with history departments in Indiana and Minnesota on “Tuning USA,” a project designed to see what American colleges and universities might learn from the Bologna Process of academic reform in Europe. 2

The Lumina project addressed rubrics—and all of university assessment—in a novel and promising way modeled on the Bologna reforms. Rather than tackling assessment in a top-down manner (from central administration directives down to individual faculty), Lumina outlined a bottom-up approach in which faculty took “ownership” of the work and established the standards for measuring performance. Rather than outlining a uniform set of academic goals cutting across all departments, Lumina emphasized the discipline-specific nature of the project, allowing those trained in a field to determine the “core competencies” of their specialty. Rather than tackling assessment haphazardly, the foundation designed a systematic effort informed by fundamental “learning outcomes” which reflected and fit a particular discipline. Rather than making assessment an isolated project of one department or one campus, Lumina encouraged participants to re-engage with key professional organizations—and the international community of scholars in their field—in order to understand the current “state of the discipline” in the evaluation of programs. And rather than speaking only among academics, the project required participants to engage with various “stakeholders” (including students, alumni, legislators, and employers) in order to establish a broad consensus about what university degrees should prepare students to “do” and “know.” 3

Our department began the work of assessment within this distinctive framework. The first lesson we learned was the most helpful: not to plunge into the project as individualists. Instead, we depended on the kindness of academic strangers who have already engaged in the effort and shared their thoughts with colleagues. Three pieces of information helped shape our work from the start. The first was a list of “learning outcomes” that historians in the United Kingdom had developed in their work on the Bologna Project. The second was an American Historical Association pamphlet, Assessment in History: A Guide to Best Practices , which offered both a sound overview of the subject and a useful vocabulary for expressing the department’s goals. 4 The third was a history rubric developed at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington that struck us as being comprehensive in its statement of broad objectives and specific requirements. 5 Drawing on all these sources, faculty proceeded with assessment knowing that they were guided by reliable colleagues who spoke for the discipline rather than being driven by an administrative agenda imposed from on high.

The second lesson we learned was to keep our questions simple and straightforward: What should students know, understand, and be able to do in the discipline of history? We needed to consider answers that were concrete, realistic, and transparent, readily understood by faculty, students, and those outside the institution. The answers we developed would stand not only as abstract ideals but also as practical guides to the goals of any course and to the structure of the entire curriculum.

Finally, we learned a key lesson of assessment: the goals we stated must be measurable. Twenty-five learning outcomes may be comprehensive; but measuring them would consume much of our time. We had to decide on a more concise list of core features that reflected the courses we taught and the specialties we have developed.

With help from the United Kingdom, the AHA, and UNC-Wilmington, the history faculty set out seven key learning outcomes arranged around three categories: historical knowledge, historical thinking, and historical skills. The scope of “knowledge” reflected the areas of historical study our department could reasonably address; we could not make promises on certain regions and particular methodologies that we could not cover. “Historical thinking” engaged students in an appreciation of the “past-ness” of the past, the complexity of past experience, and the problematic nature of the historical record itself. "Historical skills” focused on critical reading, writing, thinking, and research.

The rubrics we developed served as the means of measuring these goals. In order to make the evaluation tools as useful as possible for professors individually and the department as a whole, the rubric for any class and any exercise followed the same basic three-part pattern, addressing historical knowledge, thinking, and skills. In this way, the rubrics served as constant reminders to students of the larger, shared goals set by the department. But the specific contents of rubrics under the three headings varied according to the subject, level, and methodological focus of each course. First-year surveys might concentrate more on acquiring “knowledge” and addressing a fairly limited set of competencies in the categories of “thinking” and “skills.” Upper-division courses would likely develop a broader range of “thinking” and “skills.” The senior capstone course would require the highest and most diverse level of mastery in the different outcomes. Professors could feel confident that the rubric framed evaluation in a general yet flexible format that could be tailored to each section, reflecting the specific contributions of each course while recalling the informing objectives of the program for our majors.

We started our experiment with a rubric for the “end,” creating one evaluation form for all sections of our senior capstone course. Although faculty members define the course’s themes in different ways, we all expect the same final project: a thesis grounded in primary- and secondary-source research. With the rubric, we now also expect the same model of evaluation, one which represents a “summative” assessment of a student’s historical knowledge, thinking, and skills.

But the rubric did much more—for faculty as well as students. Class members understood more clearly the types of competencies they had developed over four years in the history major and became accustomed to a new way of talking about their disciplinary skills. 6 Faculty followed an “inter-rater reliability” approach to evaluation in order to compare and contrast their assessments of the same papers (and learned that they were, indeed, “on the same page” in the standards they applied to student work). The capstone rubric became a baseline for rubrics in other courses as faculty members scaled back and altered sections of the three-part device to reflect the specific goals of lower- and upper-division courses leading up to the capstone. And the department as a whole came to a clearer understanding of the different functions that courses play within the curriculum. 7 One consequence is that the department has developed a “pre-major” in which students follow a more logical, sequential course of study that itself models the incremental development of disciplinary skills on which we base our curriculum—and its assessment.

In the end, we have taken long-standing—but often unarticulated—standards of evaluation, stated them in a clearer, more coherent, and systematic fashion, and applied the assessment tools not simply to single courses but also to courses-within-a-curriculum. Our hope is that the experiment with rubrics will continue to expand, drawing students and faculty (and those outside the university) into a more meaningful understanding of what historical study develops in a major and “delivers” to the community.

Daniel McInerney is professor of history at Utah State University.

1. For examples of these early efforts—as well as examples of the more fully developed rubrics created by USU’s History Department for freshman surveys, upper-division courses, and the department’s senior capstone—please visit the “Mission Statement and Assessments” link on the department’s web site, at www.usu.edu/history/abouthistory09/index.htm .

2.For a full discussion of “Tuning USA” by the Lumina Foundation for Education, see: www.luminafoundation.org/our_work/tuning . Additional Web resources on the subjects raised in this article may be found in the “Rubrics, Learning Outcomes, ‘Tuning,” and “The Bologna Process: Web Resources” link on the department’s web site: www.usu.edu/history/abouthistory09/index.htm .

3.What of the “stakeholders” we surveyed? Our department asked students and alumni to rank the “core competencies” that a history education should develop. The top-ranked and bottom-ranked skills they stated matched quite closely with the highest-valued and least-valued skills faculty had selected. The Utah Board of Regents also engaged in an ambitious survey of employers in the region and learned what the Association of American Colleges & Universities has discovered in its own national samplings: that there is a strong connection between “liberal education and workforce learning.” Both educators and employers display strong similarities in the “learning outcomes” they define as essential. See: Association of American Colleges & Universities, The Quality Imperative: Match Ambitious Goals for College Attainment with an Ambitious Vision for Learning (Washington, D.C.: Association of American Colleges & Universities, 2010), 3–6; www.aacu.org/about/statements/documents/Quality_Imperative_2010.pdf .

4. AHA Teaching Division, Assessment in History: A Guide to Best Practices (Washington D.C.: American Historical Association, 2008). See also Terrel L. Rhodes, ed, Assessing Outcomes and Improving Achievement: Tips and Tools for Using Rubrics (Washington, D.C.: Association of American Colleges & Universities, 2010).

5. College of Arts and Sciences, University of North Carolina at Wilmington, “Department of History Learning Outcomes Scoring Rubric,” online at www.uncw.edu/cas/documents/Elaboratedcompetencies3.pdf .

6. For student comments about the rubrics used in a lower-division survey and an upper-division period course, see the “Student Assessment of Assessment” link on the department’s web site at www.usu.edu/history/abouthistory09/index.htm . While most students appreciated the way in which rubrics clarified the standards for course assignments, several objected to the length of the descriptions included on the form and others expressed concern that such a carefully structured set of criteria might stifle creativity and individual expression.

7. For a discussion of the way in which one colleague, Frances B. Titchener, used the “Tuning USA” project to restructure a course in the classics curriculum, see “Fine-Tuning College Degrees to the Job Market,” Christian Science Monitor, June 2, 2010, online at www.csmonitor.com/USA/Education/2010/0602/Fine-tuning-college-degrees-to-the-job-market .

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iRubric: History Research Paper Rubric

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JESSE HINGSON’S GENERAL RUBRIC FOR ARGUMENTATIVE ESSAY IN HISTORY

*This rubric is a composite of several rubrics used in several American and World courses taught at Barry University , Bowdoin College , Yale University , Manatee Community College , and Florida International University .