Please note that many tasks were constructed prior to Common Core and the task alignments to the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) were not identified in the task materials. To search for the performance tasks explicitly aligned to the CCSS, Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), or College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Framework for Social Studies State Standards, please go to CCSS, NGSS, and C3 tabs.
| Source | Task |
|---|---|
|
Source Subject Grade Level |
Women's Rights This task assesses students' ability to contextualize two historical documents and place them in the correct chronological order. This assessment draws on students' knowledge about changes in women’s rights over time . Document A is excerpted from Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, published in 1963. Document B is from the trial of Susan B. Anthony, who voted illegally in the election of 1872. More than just the recall of facts and dates, students must show that they have a broad understanding of Students must show that they have a broad understanding of how women’s rights changed over time and demonstrate the ability to use knowledge about the past to place the two documents in context. In this question, students who correctly contextualize the documents will see that Document B (an excerpt from the trial of Susan B. Anthony), which discusses the ban on women’s suffrage, was likely written before Document A (an excerpt from Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique), which describes discontent with post-World War II gender roles. Resources include PDF downloads of the assessment, a link to primary source materials, and a rubric with benchmark descriptors. |
|
Source Subject Grade Level |
World War I Advertising This task requires students to consider the relative strengths and weaknesses of a document as historical evidence. Students with a sophisticated understanding of how to source a document will be able to explain that the Kodak advertisement is useful in that it provides indirect information about the lives of soldiers and how they were able to communicate with family at the time. They will also point out that this image was created for the purposes of an advertisement, making it less useful as specific evidence of what life was like for U.S. soldiers. Resources include PDF downloads of the assessment with source materials, and a rubric with benchmark descriptors. |
|
Source Subject Grade Level |
Zulu Chief This task assesses students’ ability to source, contextualize, and corroborate a photograph of a Zulu Chief by American photographer Frank Carpenter. Students must reason about the content and the circumstances of its creation to evaluate its reliability as evidence. Students also must determine what additional information might help corroborate the evidence in the photograph. Resources available for this task include downloadable PDF versions of both the assessment as well as the Rubric with benchmark descriptors. |
If you would like to recommend additional open-sourced performance task banks to be included in the database, or if you would like to report a broken link, please email Pai-rou Chen.
© Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305