Teaching Guide
PROJECT SCORE TEACHING GUIDE
2PROJECT SCORE TEACHING GUIDETable of ContentsUsing Project Score ...........................................................................................................................................................3Section 1: Warm-Up Activities ......................................................................................................................................4Section 2: Revision Activities .......................................................................................................................................4Section 3: Prompt Library ............................................................................................................................................5Section 4: Submit to Score ..........................................................................................................................................5Activities ..............................................................................................................................................................................6Warm-Up Activities .......................................................................................................................................................7Revision Activities .........................................................................................................................................................7Prompts ................................................................................................................................................................................7
3PROJECT SCORE TEACHING GUIDEProject Score is an OER Project writing extension that can be used to support social studies writing instruction in a wide variety of classrooms. Generally designed for sixth- through twelfth-grade students, Project Score provides a set of writing activities that have a “choose your own adventure” feel, allowing you to make instructional choices based on where your students could use extra writing support. As you know, writing is a skill that requires extensive practice and continues to grow over a lifetime. Good writing is not the result of one great lesson, or one great unit—it’s a habit that needs to be practiced continually throughout the school year, and beyond. As we’ve shown in the past with our other OER Project courses (Big History Project and World History Project), students can make a lot of progress in a single school year. How? You can facilitate that progress by establishing routines and practices around writing and by providing students with tools that can help them with all types of writing and classes—not just social studies. Project Score is a set of activities that provide specific rubric-based strategies to address particular aspects of writing. In addition to the rubric-based strategies, you and your students are given access to Score, the OER Project’s free, automated essay-scoring platform that uses the Score Writing Rubric to evaluate student work. Project Score activities have been designed to work seamlessly with the Score platform and can be easily incorporated into your classroom instruction. Project Score class home page.To learn more about how to use the automated scoring platform, including navigation, class setup, student use and submission, as well as information about understanding Score’s reports and automated feedback, please check out our Score Guide. Using Project Score You’ll see that Project Score is divided into four sections on the OER Project site. In each section, you’ll make some instructional decisions, based on your class context and needs. You can repeat these four sections with as many Score essay prompts as you choose. Each section is explained in more detail in sections below.
4PROJECT SCORE TEACHING GUIDESection 1: Warm-Up ActivitiesChoose from three warm-up activities, each based on a row of the Score Writing Rubric: the Claim and Focus Warm-Up, the Analysis and Evidence Warm-Up, and the Organization Warm-Up. Note that before you complete these warm-up activities, you must choose from the 12 writing prompts in the Prompt Library (section 3). Once you have selected a prompt, students should read and analyze the sources provided so that they have a grasp of the historical content before moving into the warm-up activity. Complete any historical analysis that you feel is important to work through with your students before they dive into a warm-up activity. We also recommend you have students draft thesis/major claim statements prior to the Analysis and Evidence Warm-Up and the Organization Warm-Up. After completing the warm-up activity, students should submit their essays to Score (section 4).Warm-up activitiesSection 2: Revision ActivitiesAfter students have written their essays in Score and you’ve reviewed student scores, choose a revision activity based on their Score feedback. You can choose which revision lessons to assign in one of two ways: select the row of the Score Writing Rubric with the lowest average score and provide the corresponding revision lesson to the entire class; or group students by their individual lowest-scored row of the rubric, and assign the corresponding revision activity to each group. After students have revised essays that were evaluated by Score, we highly recommend you have them resubmit the essays to see if their scores improved! IMPORTANT: When students resubmit, it will override their past results, so make sure that you download the Score Report before re-opening the assessment.Revision activites
5PROJECT SCORE TEACHING GUIDESection 3: Prompt LibraryIn the Prompt Library, you will find 12 document based essays. Note that students will be able to see all 12 prompts as well. Find more information about the kinds of prompt we offer below. Prompt librarySection 4: Submit to ScoreYou will see icons for each of the 12 prompts in this section. In order to make the prompt available for your students to submit to Score, you will need to click Manage Assessments and then Open the prompt. Unlike in the Prompt Library, students will only see the prompts you have opened, so we recommend that you only have one prompt open at a time. Submit to Score prompts
6PROJECT SCORE TEACHING GUIDEIn order for students to submit to Score, you will need to create a class on the OER Project platform and ensure your students have joined your class. Students should then click Start on the prompt you’ve chosen in the Prompt Library. (Check the Score Guide for more information.) At this point, students have completed document analysis and a warm-up activity and are ready to respond to the essay prompt. ActivitiesThere are six writing activities in Project Score: Three warm-ups, which students complete before writing, and three revision activities, which can be used after students write. Each activity includes a writing tool to help students focus on specific aspects of the Score Writing Rubric. Each activity gives guidance for using the appropriate tool. Over time, students will be able to use the tools without as much support, and eventually, they shouldn’t need them at all. You can also use these tools with other writing prompts or assignments. The writing tools were developed and derived from the Score Writing Rubric, so if you have students use these tools for other writing assignments just keep that alignment in mind! There are six writing tools, one for each activity:1. Claim and Focus Warm-Up Tool2. Analysis and Evidence Warm-Up Tool3. Organization Warm-Up Tool4. Claim and Focus Revision Tool5. Analysis and Evidence Revision Tool6. Organization Revision ToolExamples of the Claim and Focus and Analysis and Evidence tools
7PROJECT SCORE TEACHING GUIDEWarm-Up ActivitiesThe warm-ups are fairly quick activities that help students focus on a particular aspect of their writing. Once your students are familiar with the process, the warm-up activities should take around 15 minutes to complete. The first time you introduce the tools, the process may take an entire class period. We generally recommend that you start by modeling how to use the tools with sample essays, then perhaps have students use them in small groups or pairs, with the eventual goal that students use the tools independently on their own essays.How you select which warm-up activity to use depends upon your students and where you feel they need to focus. Additionally, depending on your student’s overall skill level with each aspect of writing, you might choose to only introduce, use, or complete a part of the tool with students at any given time. For example, your students might be ready to write claims, but they may not yet be ready for counterclaims. Pick and choose in the ways that work best for you. Over time, you may let students decide on their warmup activity. This is a great way to differentiate and also a great way to have students take some responsibility for their own learning.Revision ActivitiesThe revision activities will be completed after students submit their essays to Score and you have received their Score reports. To choose a revision activity, examine your class’s Score reports and assign revision lessons to your students in one of two ways:• Select the rubric criteria with the lowest average score and assign the corresponding revision lesson to the entire class; or• Group students by their individual lowest-scored rubric criteria, and assign the corresponding revision activity to each group.Note: We do not provide warm-up or revision activities for the Language and Style row of the rubric. However, the Score platform does have a Proofread Check function, which helps improve student scores on language and style. The revision activities might take an entire class period. The activities will guide students through the revision tool. Revising can take a lot of time and effort, so even as students become more familiar with the revision tools, allow plenty of time for this work. Additionally, some of the revision tools have a lot of steps and depth, so you may just have students focus on a portion of a tool. As with the warm-ups, you may choose to only use a part of these tools depending upon your students’ skill levels. Over time, they should become more familiar with the process, eventually becoming less reliant on the tool itself. At the end of the revision activity, don’t forget to have your students resubmit their essays to Score to see if their scores changed. (Not required, but highly recommended!) If you do have students resubmit their essays, make sure you download the initial Score report! The new submissions will override the original scores.PromptsIn the Prompt Library, you will find 12 writing prompts. All of the prompts are document-based, so students will need to read and analyze the included documents before writing. Note that some prompts are called Investigations, while some are called DBQs. The difference between Investigations (created for our Big History Project course) and DBQs (created for our World History Project course) is that Investigations are long-form DBQs. The sources
8PROJECT SCORE TEACHING GUIDEtend to be longer than in a typical DBQ (our DBQs each have seven short sources, while Investigations may have up to nine sources in the document library). This may make it seem like Investigations are harder, but they actually provide more resources for a more scaffolded experience. You should pick whichever prompt is most appropriate for your context—there is no need to complete these in order and you can do as many as you like.• Prompt 1: Why do we look at things from far away and close up? • Prompt 2: How and why do individuals change their minds? • Prompt 3: How can looking at the same information from different perspectives pave the way for progress? • Prompt 4: How and why do theories become generally accepted? • Prompt 5: How and why do theories evolve?• Prompt 6: How does language make humans different? • Prompt 7: To what extent was farming an improvement over foraging? • Prompt 8: How and why have our reaction and response to disease changed?• Prompt 9: To what extent has the Modern Revolution been a positive or negative force?• Prompt 10: Evaluate the extent to which globalization since the Second World War has benefited everyone.• Prompt 11: Evaluate the extent to which the Columbian Exchange transformed the Americas from c. 1500 to 1750 CE.• Prompt 12: Evaluate the most significant causes of the partition of Africa into colonies c. 1880–1914 CE.Project Score Prompt LibraryImage creditCover: Christine de Pizan’s The Book of the City of Ladies (La Cité des Dames), c. 1405. British Library, public domain.