The Library of Congress

Immigration/Migration: Today and During the Great Depression Evaluation and Extension

1. Evaluation will be ongoing.
2. The presentations will be graded by a rubric.
3. The web sites will be graded on a pass/fail basis according to completion.
4. traditional tests will be given concerning content, but the students will have to refer to their projects in the essay portion.
5. Students will be informed beforehand of criteria, the value of each part, due dates, and given a copy of the rating sheet.
6. Optional - students will proofread each other's papers, both for correction and for practice in proofreading.

1. Students will respond to messages from individuals inquiring about their web sites.
2. In addition, see Presentations, Lesson 12.

Optional Lesson - Accuracy of Secondary Sources

1. Two articles from The Daily News and The Philadelphia Inquirer [both Philadelphia papers, owned by the same company using the same news service] cover the same event, a riot on a college campus [insert name and date]. These articles will be used to show how bias can taint historical information.

   [Note to teacher: the story is about a car driven through a block party, injuring several of the students. The difference in the articles is who provoked the act of the driver: was he drunk or did the actions of the students cause him to panic?]

2. break the class up into groups of five; each group selects a recorder. Unknown to the students, each half of the class gets a different article. [To be scanned in and posted - after gaining permission.] The students are told to read the articles and answer these questions: Who? What? When? Where? Why?
3. After the article is discussed inside the groups, the recorder from each group will give a brief report giving the group's answers.

• If the students do not discover that the articles are about the same event, the teacher will prompt them by saying something like, "Do these reports sound similar?"
• Since the reports give diametrically opposed versions of the story, this will drive home the point that secondary sources can be 'tainted' by the authors or publishers.

4. Discussion question for class:
   How do we know what really happened in that incident and, by extension, the past?

Optional Lesson Extension:

Using the Rodney King incident [1994], in which a videotape of King being beaten by Los Angeles police was shown on TV and to the jury, discuss how the jury was able to find the police "not guilty." [The tape was a primary source but the defense argued, successfully, that what the jury saw was not necessarily the whole truth.]