Assignment 2: Thinking Critically About Your Historical Topic
Due: Week 6
Points: 150
Skill(s) Being Assessed: Problem Solving
Criteria for Success: In this assignment, you will:
- Clearly describe historical challenges and/or societal changes that are related to the topic and support with specific evidence.
- Describe how challenges were addressed and/or how the changes affected society using specific evidence.
- Analyze historical sources (including corroboration), apply the correct historical context, and make connections between primary sources and current issues.
- Use the critical thinking process to summarize information and create an introduction and thesis statement that includes a clear claim and evidence.
- Use accurate grammar, punctuation, and spelling.
What to submit/deliverables: Questions submitted in Chapter 6 of the webtext.
What is the value of doing this assignment? This assignment gives you an opportunity to practice the skill of problem solving. It will show that you can work through the steps of the critical thinking process as you identify historical challenges and approaches to and strategies for solving those challenges, identifying their appropriate historical context and relating them to current issues. Problem solving is a universal skill and one you will continue to refine as you progress throughout your career. This assignment asks you to use what you’ve learned in the first six weeks of the course about using the critical thinking process to solve a problem. The good news is that you’ve already laid the foundation with the webtext activities in Chapters 4 and 5. This assignment will use what you wrote in those activities to help you record your response.
Your goal for this assignment is to: Practice your problem solving skill. You will do this by applying what you know about the critical thinking process, corroboration, and historical context as they relate to your chosen topic.
What you need to complete this assignment:
- Your chosen issue and topic from Chapters 1 and 2 of the webtext.
- The answers you provided in Chapters 4 and 5 of the webtext.
- Your completed assignment, downloaded from Chapter 6 of the webtext and uploaded and submitted to Assignment 2 in Week 6 of Blackboard.
Steps to complete: In Week 6, complete the assignment and submit it to the Week 6 Assignment 2 link in Blackboard using the following steps:
STEP 1: Review the scenario:
Imagine you represent your company at a service organization dealing with one of these two issues: Facing Economic Change or Engaging Civil Rights. Your supervisor has asked you to research information related to the history of one of these issues for your organization to help new employees and volunteers understand it better. Your predecessor already started a list of sample primary and secondary sources and collections of sources.
In this assignment, you will take the next step in creating your presentation to help new employees and volunteers understand how historical events can be applied to one of the issues currently affecting your organization.
STEP 2: Use the questions in Chapters 4 and 5 to work through the first three steps of the critical thinking process (Knowledge, Comprehension, Application) based on your sources and what you’ve learned about your topic so far.
STEP 3: Begin to formulate your explanation for your Assignment 3 presentation by answering questions in the webtext that will bring you through Step 4 of the critical thinking process (Analysis) about your chosen issue. Be sure to consider the historical topic, its challenges, and the strategies and approaches people used to deal with those challenges.
STEP 4: Synthesize your findings at the end of the worksheet as part of step 5 of the critical thinking process (Synthesis).
STEP 5: Download the assignment from the webtext and upload it to Assignment 2 in Week 6 of Blackboard
Grading for this assignment will be based on the following rubric:
