Idaho Social Studies 6-12.HT2.6
The Standard
Evaluate historical sources, considering authorship, strengths, limitations, potential biases, and appropriate application, while analyzing primary and secondary sources to understand their collective contribution to historical interpretation.
Idaho Content Standards: K-12 Social Studies
Teacher's field guide
What This Standard Means
What Students Need to Do
- Students identify who made each account and why. They decide what it can show, what it leaves out, and how the author's viewpoint may shape it. They compare firsthand records with later accounts to explain an event.
What Mastery Looks Like
- Given a worker's account, a newspaper report, and a textbook paragraph about the Triangle fire, students can say what each adds and misses. They choose a source that fits a question and use another source to check their answer.
Common Misconceptions
- Students may assume an eyewitness saw everything that happened. They may dismiss a source with a clear viewpoint as useless or assume a textbook has no viewpoint. They may call an old textbook a primary source just because it is old.
How to Assess It
- Hand out short excerpts from a Triangle fire eyewitness, a 1911 newspaper, and a textbook. Ask which best shows workers' experiences, who made it, one limit, and what another excerpt adds.
Lesson moves
Ways to Teach It
Print a Triangle fire news report, worker testimony, and textbook excerpt; have pairs mark each author's viewpoint, useful details, and missing perspectives.
Ask: Which account best shows what workers faced during the Triangle fire, and what would you check against a second account?
Play Source Match with Triangle fire question cards and source cards; award points for choosing a source and naming one limitation.
Compare a school newsletter account of a recent event with a student's firsthand account; list what each can verify and what each misses.
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Printable 6-12.HT2.6 Worksheet
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Related Standards
- 6-12.HT1.4
Construct and/or communicate a historical argument using primary and secondary sources.
- 6-12.HT2.5
Analyze how current interpretations of the past are limited by the extent to which available historical sources represent the perspectives of people at the time...
- 6-12.HT1.3
Evaluate historical sources, considering authorship, strengths, limitations, and perspectives, while analyzing primary and secondary sources to understand their...
- 6-12.HT2.9
Evaluate the central arguments in secondary works of history on related topics in multiple media in terms of their historical accuracy.
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