Clarification details
Updated December 2020. The section ‘Assessment workload’ of this document has been updated.
Analysing perspectives
The evidence presented for assessment needs to be written as an historian writes rather than as a role play in which the student has assumed the identity of an historical person in an imaginative way. At least two perspectives which are clearly different need to be analysed.
For Achieved, ‘explaining’ means identifying different perspectives and then providing historical evidence which explains why the perspectives were/are held. Explanations need to be specific and in a depth that is appropriate for curriculum level 8.
For Merit, students need to make judgements about the perspectives that they have been explaining. Students should be expected, for example, to identify particular historical reasons or prejudices that created the perspective(s), and then to comment, as an historian, on the validity or otherwise of the person’s perspective(s). These comments need to be supported by historical evidence rather than communicating an unsupported personal reaction.
For Excellence, a student will have produced evidence that is similar in nature to a Merit student, but judgements will be based on greater depth of historical evidence and explanation, clearly demonstrating thorough engagement with the evidence and the ideas being analysed. Overall conclusions need to be drawn about whether perspectives that have been analysed are valid.
Assessment workload
Where assessment workload is an issue, teachers may wish to:
- suggest word counts
- ensure that contexts used for assessment are not too broad
- make use of the overlap in standards 91435 and 91437 to offer a combined assessment opportunity.
Other considerations
Teachers may choose to supply some or all relevant materials for students to analyse. If the teacher provides all materials, they need to enable students to produce evidence that is in a depth and degree of sophistication that is expected at this curriculum level.
A brief historian’s introduction to the context can be appropriate, but students need to be aware that this is usually not evidence that directly contributes to the assessment judgement and should be kept brief.