ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the tools that elementary teachers use in assessing students. Teachers want to stress that all assessment in elementary social studies should be firmly based on the goals and objectives of the social studies program. Assessment is important to teaching and learning when it helps teachers, students, parents, and administrators improve on what is already being done. Well-constructed assessment gives students and parents, as much as teachers, ownership in the learning process. This can only be accomplished if all are involved in deciding what the assessment will be and how it will be used. It is an important and complex part of elementary social studies. Assessment tools allow teachers to examine their own effectiveness as well as the learning of their students. Projects and reports may be evaluated in several ways. The most common of these are any number of types of subjective evaluation with or without comment, checklist evaluation, analytical evaluation, rubrics, peer evaluation, and self-evaluation.
