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OnRamps History: Professional Learning Institute

Evaluating primary sources

Evaluating sources

What to know about teaching evaluation skills for primary sources

  • Primary sources come with the weight of authority because they are created by eyewitnesses and participants. Think of how folks use terms like, 'firsthand knowledge' or 'saw it with my own eyes' or 'pics or it didn't happen'. But students need to dig deeper to think about influences on one's perception of an event.

  • Evaluating sources is not a skill students will be taught in one week or in one course - you're laying the foundation for deeper skills that will be honed in a student's specific discipline. 

  • You're teaching students the skills they need to evaluate viewpoints no matter where they find them - i.e. from vetted sources and from Twitter.

  • You will need to revisit the teaching of these skills throughout the semester. 

  • Evaluating sources is intuitive to you - that is not the case for early researchers.

  • Bias is an over-weaponized word. It simply refers to the investments we all have in the world and how those investments change our experience of the world, of events and how they change how we perceive and participate in arguments.

Skills you'll need to reinforce throughout the semester

I avoid, come hell or high water, simplistic tests or mnemonic acronyms to use in evaluating info. You should, too. It doesn't allow for nuance and makes a complex process into a checklist.

  • Authority: Who created this and what was their investment in participating in or documenting this event?
  • Audience: Who is meant to see this? Why was it created? Is this source for a specific audience? Does it inform or persuade?
  • Bias: in language or visual cues. Why did the creator use these terms? Choose these subjects in their images?
  • Format: What clues does the type of artifact you are looking at give you about the topic? A diary may have never been meant for an audience; a letter is to a specific person. What is a newspaper for? (seriously ask them this because they likely have never seen one).

Why are our pictures puzzles?

Visual rhetoric (or, visual literacy):

  • Students are not proficient at 'reading' images even as they are so compelled by them. They don't often assign bias to image creators, electing to think of images as the objective truth.
  • Searching for images can be difficult because what you find relies upon how people describe their image or what words appear elsewhere on that page.
  • Searching for images is a good place to talk about metadata - or, how people describe things so that they can be discovered. You'll likely find that students enjoy talking about how we or 'they' (maybe the media) describe things and how that relates to issues of identity.
  • Students often forget that images need to be cited. 
  • Students often forget that images are intellectual property and are subject to copyright laws.

Questions you may ask students about images:

  • When you search for images on the Web or in a database, what problems do you run into? How have you had to edit your keyword search to retrieve the images you want?
  • How do authors use images to convey their message? Can you think of some examples?
  • How can you use imagery to invoke emotion and sway an audience to your viewpoint? Can you think of some examples?

Analysis sheets (to be edited)

The following can be downloaded or copied to your google drive. They were created for hands-on activities in physical collections, but you can adapt them to your goals and for digital archival material.

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