My Fall Semester Project

Fall Semester Project- Reflection

5th Block-12/12/12

I thought that this fall semester project was fairly simple in the process that my group took to completing it. For this document based question essay, my group has had prior knowledge of the topic we chose which was the British having control over the colonists during the American Revolution. Since we had prior knowledge on this subject, it was pretty easy finding documents that we could use for our document based question. Most of the documents we chose were ones that we have already learned about in previous history classes. For example, some of the documents were acts passed during this time like the Stamp Act. We knew the effect that each individual act had on the colonists which helped our decision making progress. Some of the other documents that we used we found on some good American history document websites. These websites had hundreds of documents that had to do with the British and the colonists affairs during the American Revolution which gave my group plenty to choose from. Even though there were hundreds to choose from, only some had to do with the question and subject we were working with so that narrowed them down quite a bit. After finding the first 15 documents, we narrowed down the list to 10, taking out the least important ones. Some of the 15 documents were obviously less important than others which made it a lot easier to narrow down. After narrowing down the documents, one of the more difficult parts of the project came which was grouping the documents into 3 groups for the essay. One obvious group for our documents was the "act group" which had all of the acts and laws restricting colonists to do certain things during that time. The second group was the "big events group" which had all of the major events that the British did when controlling the colonists like the Boston Tea Party or the Boston Massacre. The final group was the "map, charts, etc. group" which had the charts or maps showing the restrictions that colonists had from the British. Once we had all of the documents together with a source for each and all organized together, the project was basically done and just needed a student to write a document based question essay for our project. After someone did that in class, my group read over their essay and was very impressed on how that student interpreted those documents with the question that we made. We thought that the groups that this student used made a lot more sense and more specific than the ones we originally thought of. The groups that this student thought of were actions of the British, increased taxes, and British violence on the colonists. After reading these groups and reading the essay of the student, we realized that the groups we made were quite vague and not very specific compared to ones the student used. This student also provided additional documents that we could use on this subject which we thought were well thought of and were great ideas. Even though the student that wrote the essay for our project had different ideas of the grouping, that student basically had the same main ideas that we had which were shown in the essay. That main idea mainly had to do with the way that the British were controlling the colonists. Both of us also had the same ideas of which documents were more important to the question than others were. I thought that this fall project was a lot more interesting than previous history class's group projects because instead of answering a question for the project, you get to create the question instead.