Midterm Exam II

For the midterm exam, you will answer your choice of five of the following fifteen chapter questions in detail.

1. Who was in North America on the eve of European contact?
2. Describe early attempts at establishing settlements in North America.
3. What role did religion play in the early European colonies?
4. How did France, Britain, and Spain compete in North America before 1750?
5. What led to resistance against Britain?
6. How did the colonists defeat the greatest empire of the day?
7. What was the process of creating the current government of the USA? (documents)
8. What was the significance of the war of 1812?
9. What is the connection between industrialization and westward expansion?
10. Andrew Jackson, discuss.
11. ---
12. Describe the social divisions of the pre-civil war south and the importance of cotton.
13. How did immigration and westward expansion influence American party politics?
14. Why did the South secede?
15. How did the issue of emancipation transform the war?
16. Why did Reconstruction fail?

If you would like to suggest an alternative or improvement to a question or questions, please post a comment to this post before midnight tonight.



 

Midterm Exam

After reviewing the suggestions posted in the student blogs, I have concluded that this is a very diverse group. The only key-term definition overlap was "bill of rights." Recommendations of an exam with definitions and short essay(s) (with one being an opinion option) occurred more than once. Listing the presidents in order and describing there importance was an interesting idea that might be transformed into something other students would like if we made it the opinion essay questions (e.g., who was the most important president up to 1870?). True or False is pedagogically even less sound than multiple choice, so that's not happening.

I did some exploring and discovered Patti Andrews' exam from 2013 for this class. Her students were to answer five questions from a list of about twenty that they had put together at their review session. Sample questions were

• How did life change for Americans after the revolution? For whom did it change and for whom did it remain much the same?
• What was the purpose of having a “separation of powers” in the new government of the United States?

I'm going to pull together a list of basic questions, one for each of the sixteen chapters we've covered, and bring them to our review session on Monday. I will take your blog post suggestions into consideration as I create them. We can work through them and rework them in class to create an exam that is fair and useful.