Caribou High School Library

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scenario

components: written / oral

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Presidential Pundits*

A Comprehensive Social Studies Project

*Pundit : n. expert authority or commentator

Scenario: Your class has been asked to assist with creating a new American President gallery at the White House. Your task is to construct a visual to assess, evaluate, and grade your President of the United States.

Written Component: You will be assigned a category and a president to begin researching and putting together your presidential evaluation. You will create a brief written article, which explains your assessment of the president.

explain your terms of criteria
examine your president’s performance based on your criteria
assess and evaluate your president

Oral Component: You will be assessed for group participation in several groups. Your contributions to the discussions and the overall project are important.

Category group: you will be working with other specialists in your category to define and construct the criteria used to evaluate and assess your president.
President group: you will be working with specialists from other categories to evaluate and assess the performance of your president.

Taskline:

Task 1: work with category groups to establish the criteria you will use to assess and evaluate your president and research your president

Task 2: work with category groups to apply your criteria by comparing and contrasting the five presidents.

Task 3: work with president groups to evaluate and assess the performance of your president based on the different categories.

Task 4: create Presidential Report Cards.

Task 5: brief group presentations of Presidential Report Cards.

Presidential Report Card top

Task: Your task is to create a visual to assess, evaluate, and grade your President of the United States.

Goals:

Visually appealing
Thorough assessment
Focus
Brief presentation

Don’t forget:

List and define categories
Write 2-3 line comment to defend your assessment
Grade

Topics: These are some suggested topics within the four categories. Your class must decide how these categories will be weighted in the overall grade of your president—is one category more important?

Foreign Relations: allies, trade, world peace
Economics: money system, national debt, treasury, employment, tax system, production
Leadership: open-minded, good decision skills, trustworthy, active, honest, making good laws, people feel safe, re-elected, well-respected, appearance, friendly, public relations

Domestic Affairs: crime, peace in our streets, trade, population, growth, technology

Databases for Presidents top

Database Quicklinks, Description and Information

pages maintained by Barbara Finlay, Library Media Specialist