Chapter 5: It’s in the Bag: Alternative Assessment and the Brown Bag Exam

We designed a Brown Bag Exam (Ousley, 2008) to assess and enrich teacher candidates’ understanding of a required course text titled Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (Diamond, 1997).

I (Jeremy Hilburn, first author and methods instructor) selected Guns, Germs, and Steel as a required reading because the sixth-grade curriculum standards in my state require the teaching of world history up until 1450. I realized that this content area was the weak link in my teacher candidates’ content knowledge. Guns, Germs, and Steel provides a well-argued macro-theory (though admittedly with limitations) that explains why Europeans were the ones who did the colonizing, rather than, say, Australians. Thus, this text addresses much of the content in the sixth-grade curriculum.