What a primary source evaluation question is really asking

History tests are full of questions like these: "The author's point of view most likely affected the document in which of the following ways?" "Which of the following best describes the purpose of this speech?" "This source would be most useful to a historian studying which of the following?" Students tend to read them as content questions and answer with whatever they remember about the topic. That's the mistake. These questions are asking about the source, not the event.

What is a primary source evaluation question really asking?

A primary source is evidence, and evidence comes from somebody, at some moment, for some reason. A sourcing question wants to know whether you noticed that.

The College Board's AP U.S. History framework names this skill directly. It calls it Sourcing and Situation and breaks it into four parts: the source's point of view, its purpose, its historical situation, and its audience. The Digital Inquiry Group, the team behind the free "Reading Like a Historian" lessons, uses four related habits: sourcing, contextualization, corroboration, and close reading. Different labels, same core idea. Before you trust what a document says, figure out who made it, when, for whom, and why.

There's research behind this. In a study published in 1991, Sam Wineburg asked eight historians and eight high school seniors to think out loud while they read documents about the Battle of Lexington. One big difference between the groups was what they did first. The historians looked at who wrote each document and when before deciding how much to trust it. Wineburg called this the sourcing heuristic. The students were much more likely to treat a document as a neutral container of facts.

What four questions should students ask before they read the body?

Here's a habit worth drilling until it's automatic. Before reading the main text of a document, answer four questions, a few words each:

1. Who made it? What was this person's role, and what did they have at stake?
2. When? What had just happened, and what hadn't happened yet?
3. For whom? A private letter, a newspaper, a court, a crowd, a government?
4. Why? To persuade, to report, to record, to defend, to sell?

Most of the answers come from the source line: the author, the date, the type of document, and sometimes a short note from the test writer. Students skip that line all the time. It's often the most important text on the page.

How does this look in a worked example from 1776?

On July 2, 1776, the Continental Congress voted in favor of Richard Henry Lee's resolution declaring the colonies independent. The Declaration of Independence was adopted two days later, on July 4. On July 3, John Adams wrote a letter to his wife, Abigail, predicting that "the Second Day of July 1776" would be the most memorable epoch in American history and would be celebrated by future generations.

Run the four questions:

• Who: John Adams, a Massachusetts delegate to the Continental Congress and a member of the committee assigned to draft the Declaration. He wasn't a bystander. He had pushed for this outcome.
• When: The day after the vote for independence and the day before Congress adopted the Declaration. He didn't know yet how the war would go, or that July 4 would become the date Americans celebrate.
• For whom: His wife. A private letter, not a public speech.
• Why: To share news and his own reaction with someone close to him.

Now a test question:

The answer is B. Adams was a leading advocate of independence writing privately the day after the vote, so the letter is strong evidence of how someone in his position saw that moment. Choice A is the classic overreach. One delegate's letter can't tell you how ordinary people in thirteen colonies felt. Choice C is off topic; nothing in the letter is about the army. Choice D is the trap for students who answer from memory. The letter was written before July 4 had any special meaning, and it actually points to a different date.

Why is useful not the same as neutral?

Students often think a source with a point of view is a bad source. It isn't. Adams's letter is openly one-sided, and that's exactly what makes it valuable for some questions and weak for others. Usefulness always depends on the question you're asking. A biased source is excellent evidence of what its author believed. It's weak evidence of what everyone believed.

That's where corroboration comes in. Not every colony was on board on July 2. New York's delegates abstained until July 9. A student who checks Adams's enthusiasm against the vote record gets a fuller picture than either source gives alone. That's what historians do, and it's what the hardest test questions reward.

How can I teach primary source evaluation questions?

• Cover the body text. Show students only the source line and have them predict what the document will say and what slant it might have. Then reveal the text and check.
• Make "who, when, for whom, why" a routine. Same four questions, every document, all year.
• Use free tools that already exist. The Library of Congress offers a Primary Source Analysis Tool built around three moves: observe, reflect, and question. It works well for photographs, maps, and cartoons, where there's no text to lean on.
• Grade the reasoning, not just the letter. When students review a sourcing question, have them say which part of the source line led them to the right answer. That's the transferable skill.

Students who learn to ask who made a source, and why, get better at more than history questions. They get better at reading anything that's trying to tell them something, and that covers most of what they'll read.

Related

• A World War II source lesson with HIPP and OPCVL organizers
• A Great Depression source lesson and DBQ
• Practice testing and feedback
• High-level reading in history class

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