Circles in Triangles

In this task, students must calculate the radius of various inscribes circles. 

This task includes:
1. Task Description
2. Scoring Rubric
3. Scored Student Work
4. Unscored Student Work

Clay's American System

This task assesses students’ ability to reason how evidence supports a historical argument. Students must explain how Henry Clay's speech defending his “American System”, and an editorial critique of federal government intervention, both support the conclusion that many Americans opposed increased government regulation at the time.

Resources available for this task include downloadable PDF versions of both the assessment as well as the Rubric with benchmark descriptors.

Cold War Foreign Policy

This task assesses students’ ability to contextualize two historical documents, sequencing them in the correct chronological order.

Document A is an excerpt from the joint resolution by the Allies at the Moscow Conference in 1943.  Document B is from an article published in the Chicago Daily News on February 14, 1951. This task draws on students' knowledge about American foreign policy but in a way that goes beyond the simple recall of facts and dates. Students must show that they have a broad understanding of how American foreign policy changed over time, and demonstrate the ability to use knowledge about the past place the two documents in context.

Students who correctly contextualize the documents will see that Document A, which describes an alliance between the United States, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and China against Germany, was a product of World War II foreign policy and therefore likely written before Document B, which refers to American Cold War containment policy in Korea. 

Resources available with this task include PDF documents of the assessment itself (with sources), as well as a rubric.

Connections to the Philippine-American War

This task assesses students' historical knowledge in a way that transcends the rote recall of facts by asking students to draw on their knowledge of the past to construct an argument about how two events are connected. Question 1 asks students to connect the explosion of the USS Maine to the imprisonment of Filipinos by the American military in 1901. Question 2 asks students how the popularity of Social Darwinism in the US is likewise connected to the imprisonment of Filipinos in 1901.

The task includes a range of supplementary materials, all accessible and available for download with the creation of a free account through the site:

• A downloadable PDF version of the task 
• Both an Interactive Rubric with Student Work Samples, as well as a downloadable PDF version of the Rubric
• Link to primary source photograph used in the assessment - from the Library of Congress
• A section titled "Going Deeper" which provides teachers with a Video Clip of background, strategy and implementation suggestions by the task's creators.