Paper Example on Analyzing Primary Sources: Historical Thinking Skills Test

Questions Testing the Historical Thinking Skills to Interpret and Analyze a Primary Source

1. Analyze the communication skill of the author, how does the author try to pass the message across?

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2. Who can be the intended audience of the information being presented by the author?

3. What do we know about the economic, social, and political status of the author's society during the time of writing? How does it affect the writing?

4. What makes this source advantageous in deriving historical information?

Questions Testing Skills to Cite Evidence to Support Claims

1. What does the author of the information, emphasize the message in the source.

2. What is the evidence of beliefs of the author in the source, are they similar to the beliefs of other writers of history during his time?

3. Are there instances of bias in the source? what proves that.

4. What are the historical questions that this source has answered?

Analysis of the Questions

The questions above are important in evaluating a student's skill in identifying a primary source, interpretation, and analysis and finally providing evidence by citing readings from the source. Analyzing a primary source is the only way of understanding any historical information. The sources types can be images, books, or even videos, hence important to understand the type of source and how it can be analyzed. The knowledge of the author, his name and the historical background is useful in evaluating, the secondary sources on their work, and even access other historical resources they authored (Black and MacRaild, 2016). This can be useful in comparing the evidence provided. There is no historical research that relies on a single source from an author.

Finally, historical thinking skills require that the student or a historian understands the purpose of a message or information by the author. Every author of a primary historical source has an audience for the message. They always have a purpose for writing, either to inform citizens about their political rights, social lives, and even human rights issues. Social issues surrounding the author during the period of the writing or shooting of photograph sources greatly affects the presentation of the information. The writer can be biased or fair concerning the based on the social situation. Using a primary source, during historical interrogation develops a complex understanding of knowledge and first-hand information on a subject

The skill of citing evidence in a historical material is essential. The questions testing the student's ability to cite evidence are focused on referring the student back to the readings and quote passages that are useful in understanding the message in the source. By citing a belief a believe that is held by the author, the students prove that they have actually analyzed the work and have drawn tangible conclusions. The ability to cite evidence enables historians to understand the limitations of a source.

References

Black, J., & MacRaild, D. M. (2016). Studying history. In Studying history (pp. 167-187). Macmillan Education UK. https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=mG9XkmEAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=sra