What’s in Your Pocket and Life in a Box: Performance Assessment Model Activities

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Understanding Goal Understanding Goal

Discoveries can be supported by primary sources from multiple perspectives.

Investigative QuestionInvestigative Question

How might primary source evidence support an idea?

Participant performance tasks in model activity:

  • Create and test a hypothesis.
  • Support a hypothesis with evidence and background knowledge.

Facilitator will:

  1. Place primary source clues about an individual in an envelope or box. Depending on size of group, participants may share one box or work individually. View example boxes in the "Life in a Box" table.  Boxes will be differentiated according to reading ability and bibliographic record clues.  Red = most challenging, Blue = average difficulty, Green = least challenging.
  2. Prepare a key to the identity of boxes to give during Life in a Box and Designing Performance Assessments.
  3. Post criteria for Sleuth levels, apprentice, journeyman, master.
  4. Model “What’s in you Pocket?” warm-up activity with the whole group, actions 1 through 8 below.
  5. Explain that this activity is a performance assessment meaning that students will demonstrate their understanding and will use specific criteria to evaluate their work.
  6. Rate the hypothesis from the groups’ What’s in Your Pocket activity as a performance assessment of student understanding of the goal: Discoveries can be supported by primary sources that demonstrate multiple perspectives.
    Evaluating a Hypothesis:
    • Master Sleuth: uses evidence from an examination, subject knowledge, and research with multiple sources to support a hypothesis.
    • Journeyman Sleuth: uses evidence from an examination and subject knowledge to
      support a hypothesis.
    • Apprentice Sleuth: makes a hypothesis without specific evidence to support it.

Participants will:

"What’s in Your Pocket?" Performance Assessment Model Activity

  1. Find a partner, preferably someone not very familiar.
  2. Choose an item from a pocket, purse, or bag. Sample items might be keys, receipts, jewelry, or other items.
  3. Describe objectively the item (a primary source artifact under examination) to a partner.
  4. Work as a Historical Sleuth to ask and then the partner answers a few questions about the item.
  5. Ask partner to make a hypothesis about the owner of the item’s life based on the discoveries.
  6. Offer evidence to support or refute the hypothesis. Evaluate the Sleuth level of the hypothesis.
  7. Repeat the process, switching roles with the partner.
  8. Once the activity has finished, discuss the following with the group:
    • What professionals work in this manner?
    • How could you support your hypothesis about someone's life to improve your Sleuth level?
    • How does this activity connect with the resources at the Library of Congress?

Life in a Box Performance Assessment Model Activity

Part One: Examining primary source clues to create a supported hypothesis.

  1. Choose a box or envelope with primary source clues in it. Prepare bibliographic information on each item in every box or envelope and to participants when needed to answer questions.
  2. Examine primary source items in numerical order from one of the boxes.  Start with the lowest number, the most difficult primary source clue. Use bibliographic information to answer questions about the items.
  3. Examine the items found in the box to:
    • Describe and determine what the item is.
    • Determine to whom the item may have belonged and what the item may tell about the person’s life.
    • Use the Student Worksheet to facilitate examining the items.
  4. Discuss how primary source sleuthing builds aspects of student understanding.
  5. Share findings with large group if time permits and evaluate sleuth levels.

Part Two: Create an exhibition as a performance assessment to make explicit the big ideas of a subject.

Facilitator will:
  1. Establish that participants will take on the role of curators to create a new exhibit for a museum on Scientists in History. Announce that the space for the exhibition is limited.
Participants will:
  1. Complete the process again with a set of boxes related to one subject chosen by the facilitator.
    For example, all of the boxes numbered in the 20's represent scientists.
  2. Determine a common characteristic of the items that were chosen. For example, role in history.
  3. Choose one item from the box to represent the scientists' work in an exhibition. Be able to justify why this item is representative.
  4. Tape the items on a wall to create an exhibition for review.
  5. Identify a title for the Exhibition and big ideas about the subject that are supported through the primary sources in the exhibition. Discuss “What might the exhibition suggest about the Library of Congress”?
  6. Brainstorm next steps to with students. Possible follow-ups are available here.
Facilitator will discuss with participants: 
  1. Best Instructional Practices:
    Differentiated Instruction: Academic Readiness Level
    • Provide a variety of primary sources requiring the use of different academic strengths to interpret.
    • Assign students to explorations that are more concretely or abstractly related to the subject. For example, a box with a green label might begin with a portrait of a person the items represent and may have bibliographic information included with each item. A box with a red label might begin with an item that encourages the student to make a wrong hypothesis and may contain no bibliographic information.
    Teaching for Understanding: Facets of understanding and primary source analysis
    Primary source analysis requires students to use facets of understanding described by Wiggins, G. & J. McTighe. (1998). Understanding by Design: Alexandria, VA: Association of Supervision and Curriculum Development. (44-47)
    • Explain: support hypothesis by pointing to evidence in primary sources.
    • Interpret: make sense of primary sources by connecting to personal experience and knowledge.
    • Apply: skills and knowledge from multiple subjects to identify and interpret a primary source.
    • Perspective: identify the perspective of a primary source and agree or disagree with it.
    • Empathize: recognize the value of a primary source in terms of history and today.
    • Self-knowledge: evaluate the level a hypothesis is supported in reliable evidence and realize when to conduct further research.
  2. Primary Source Learning Design: “Performance Assessments have what characteristics?”
  3. Library of Congress: “What does this tell us about the Library’s exhibitions?”
Participants will:
    • Search the Library of Congress web site for Lincoln’s pocket using the search box at LOC.gov.
    • Identify what was in Lincoln’s pocket?
    • Question, research, and hypothesize what might the pocket contents tell about Lincoln’s character and frame of mind on that day? How can research support our hypothesis?