Teaching Sourcing & Contextualization with HATs

You can’t understand content without context. Yet many students fail to consider the circumstances in which a historical document was created. Help students learn the historical thinking skills of contextualization and sourcing with our materials.  

Our Contextualization and Sourcing classroom posters remind students what questions to ask when reading a historical document. 

Learn more about these skills with these videos. 

Using History Assessments of Thinking (HATs) to Source and Contextualize

One example of a HAT you could use to teach students to source and contextualize historical evidence is our Opposition to the Philippine-American War task. 

The task presents two documents that offer dramatically different portrayals of the war. Yet when you source and contextualize them, both provide evidence for American public opposition to the conflict: The first is from a congressional hearing and the second is a letter to the editor of a newspaper.

While the content of each document is very different, the source information and historical context of both indicate that there was national alarm and public division over the Philippine-American War.

Reinforce student learning with more practice in sourcing and contextualization. We have nine alternative versions of the Opposition to the Philippine-American War task, featuring documents about the Civil War, Haitian Revolution, United Farm Workers, and more.