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The Skills Development Package for Effective Assessment in Social Studies and History |
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Welcome to the skills development
site. You have probably come to one of the most important websites
understanding and effectively applying the following skills:
The packages here are put together by the humanities teachers from Sembawang Secondary School. For each of the skills, a variety of strategies are used to allow pupils to understand the skills and apply them effectively in assessment. These strategies include the following: 1. Application of daily life issues to allow pupils to understand how to apply the skills well. This varies from use of sources related to soccer to incidents which happened in schools. 2. Categorisation and provision of a variety of questions for the various skills to allow pupils to understand the various ways in which skills could be asked. 3. Use of a variety of symbols to allow pupils to relate to and understand the various skills better ie. 'The Star Approach' for interpretation and inferential skills, 'The Triangle Approach' for comparison skills, 'The V Approach' for Reliability Skills and 'The Square Approach' for essay writing skills. 4. Suggestions on various techniques to apply when doing assessment on the various skills. 5. Provision of marking exercises to try out and understand how apply the skills better. |
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This package is the only package which is developed using Lectora Software instead of Powerpoint. Thus, it functions differently from the others and cannot be edited. The Star Approach here allows pupils to interpret and understand the context in which the source is created better. As inferential skills is a basic skills. this star approach also comes in handy for other skills such as Comparison Skills, Reliability Skills and Utility Skills. This package also provides pupils with various skills to retrieve information from sources i.e. Layering Technique (something many schools have shared about and NIE is also using), Retrieval Technique and Partitioning Technique. | ||
| The Triangle
Approach applied here is a an interesting and yet a simple approach for
pupils to understand and do comparison effectively. While most pupils
are able to detect the similarities and differences, not many are not
able to match the comparison with relevant statements and links. The
Triangle Approach allows pupils to pick suitable statements for the
various evidences in the sources, leading to a clear and comprehensive
answer. While this package was put together by teachers from Sembawang Secondary School, the Triangle Approach was invented and started by Ms Tan Yen Lin from St Hilda's Secondary School. Our thanks to Ms Tan Yen Lin for this. |
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| While the Star Approach can still be used here to detect purpose and use the purpose to detect reliability and utility of sources, a new strategy in necessary for cross-referencing skills. The V Approach allows for this, making cross-reference manageable for the pupils. The marking exercise here also highlights the various mistakes pupils make while cross-referring. | |||
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The essay writing skills or the Square Approach allow pupils to look at 4 key areas in writing essay questions. This include answering the question, identifying the factors, writing the story or the description and providing relevant explanation. Another important training provided here is to detect the 4 different types of questions to allow pupils to be clear about the demands of the question asked. | ||
