Assignment Overview

One of the most important skills you can develop is the ability to think about your thinking and learning (this is called metacognition). Regardless of your eventual goals in life, you will need to learn information and skills, and you will need to be able to know if you have learned these things well enough (whether it is by your own standards or someone else’s standards).

This assignment asks you to reflect on your learning in this course so far.

Basic Assignment Tasks

Use the media and genre of your choice (essay, video, audio recording, picture collage, etc.) to communicate all of the following information:

• Your current course grade
• A brief discussion of why you currently have this grade and if you’re happy with it or not
• Strategies to improve your grade if you’d like a higher grade
• A brief overview of what you currently understand about the periods we’ve covered so far (Units 1–8)
• A brief overview of what you’d like to understand better about Units 1–8
• An assessment of your historical skills
  • Your ability to interpret primary sources
  • Your ability to organize and think critically about historical sources
  • Your ability to apply the 5 Cs of Historical Thinking
• A brief overview of your comfort with ambiguity, and how it has changed since the beginning of the course

Assignment Rationale

Purpose: This assignment provides students the opportunity to self-assess their current progress towards achieving course outcomes.

Learning Outcomes: All course outcomes

Criteria for Success

This assignment is worth 40 points. Grading will be based on the following criteria:

• Reflection includes student’s current course grade—2 points
• Reflection includes student’s satisfaction/dissatisfaction with personal performance in the course—2 points
• Reflection includes a brief discussion of student’s content mastery—4 points
• Reflection includes a brief discussion of how student would like to improve content mastery—2 points
• Reflection includes a brief assessment of student’s ability to read and interpret primary sources—4 points
• Reflection includes a brief assessment of student’s ability to organize and think critically about course material—4 points
• Reflection includes a brief assessment of student’s ability apply the 5 Cs—4 points
• Reflection includes a discussion of student’s comfort with ambiguity—4 points
• Reflection includes strategies to improve student’s grade—6 points
• Reflection references specific ideas from course materials and indicates student thought about course materials and course concepts—4 points
• Reflection effectively uses conventions of the chosen genre to communicate information—4 points