Sourcing¶

Strategy · All strategies
Evidence · 2 claims (2 for) · 6 studies (5 causal, 1 quant-synthesis), q2–q4 · 1 of 6 report an effect size

Description¶

Sourcing is a historical- and civic-reasoning strategy in which learners interrogate the origin of a source before engaging with its content: Who produced it? When? For what audience and purpose? Is it trustworthy for this use? Rather than reading a document as transparent information, learners treat it as a claim made by someone, and use attributes of the source (author expertise, motive, date, publication venue) to evaluate its claims. It is typically carried out through structured questions, side-by-side source comparison, and explicit modeling of expert evaluation.

Design Implications¶

Sourcing shifts learners from reading for content to reading for warrant — a hallmark of disciplinary literacy in history and, more recently, online information evaluation. Novices tend to judge documents by surface features (length, tone, website design) or by whether content matches prior beliefs; instruction in sourcing questions measurably improves the quality of their evaluations Instruction in civic online reasoning improves learners' evaluation of information. [+S]. The strategy works best when the teacher models the reasoning, not just the questions — asking "who wrote this?" is easy; noticing why the answer matters for interpreting the document is the expert move Think-Aloud makes visible.

Context¶

Requirements¶

• Authentic documents with meaningful provenance differences (varying authors, dates, motives, venues)
• Explicit sourcing questions (e.g., Stanford History Education Group's "Who created it? When? Why?") presented as a reusable routine
• Teacher modeling of how source attributes change interpretation, not just identification of attributes
• Multiple sources on the same event or claim, so sourcing judgments have consequences for the task

Constraints¶

• Sourcing questions applied as a checklist, without reasoning about relevance to the claim at hand, produce ritual compliance rather than evaluation [-M]
• Less effective when all sources are pre-vetted and equally reliable — learners never experience why sourcing matters
• Heavy source interrogation can crowd out content learning when documents are dense or learners are weak readers [~M]; scaffold with excerpts or Chunking
• Transfer to novel web contexts is limited unless instruction uses live, unfamiliar sources rather than curated textbook materials [-M]

Implementation Variability¶

• Document-based history lessons: sourcing questions embedded in Case Studies with corroborating and conflicting accounts
• Lateral reading for web evaluation: learners leave the page to investigate the source itself — the modern extension of sourcing to online information
• Corroboration pairing: two sources on the same event, with sourcing as the first step before Comparing Cases [+W] analysis
• Sourcing as pre-reading routine: brief provenance check before any assigned reading, building a habitual stance

Target Learners¶

• Middle school through college students in history, social studies, and media literacy contexts Instruction in civic online reasoning improves learners' evaluation of information. [+S]
• Novices who default to surface features or belief consistency when judging information
• Adults in professional contexts that require evidence appraisal (journalism, law, health, research methods courses)
• Requires enough reading fluency to extract author and purpose cues; pre-readers need scaffolded versions

Target Learning Goals¶

• Disciplinary literacy: thinking like a historian or evidence-based professional
• Critical evaluation of information quality and bias
• Epistemic cognition: understanding that all claims have makers, motives, and contexts
• Corroboration and argumentation from multiple sources

Instructions¶

1. Present a document with visible provenance (author, date, venue, stated purpose) before revealing full content.
2. Pose the sourcing questions as a routine: Who made this? When? Why? What does that mean for how I should read it?
3. Model the reasoning with a Think-Aloud: show how knowing the author's position changes the interpretation of specific lines.
4. Provide a second, differently-situated source on the same event and have learners compare accounts, using sourcing judgments to explain discrepancies.
5. Require learners to justify which source they trust more for a specific purpose — reliability is always relative to use.
6. Fade the routine: move from teacher-posed questions to learner-initiated sourcing on unfamiliar documents, ideally live web sources.

Related Strategies¶

• A Finder's Guide to Facts — a broader fact-checking framework in which sourcing is the first evaluative move
• 3-Source Rule — corroboration across independent sources complements single-source provenance checks

Examples¶

• Stanford History Education Group — Reading Like a Historian — free document-based lessons in which every lesson opens with sourcing questions before students read; extensively field-tested in secondary classrooms.
• Civic Online Reasoning curriculum — Stanford's sequence of classroom tasks teaching lateral reading and source evaluation for web information; shown to improve evaluation in intervention studies Instruction in civic online reasoning improves learners' evaluation of information. [+S].
• Document-Based Questions (DBQs) in AP History exams — students must cite sourcing (author's point of view, purpose, historical situation) for documents to earn credit, institutionalizing the routine at scale.

Key Sources¶

• Wineburg, S. (1991). Historical problem solving: A study of the cognitive processes used in the evaluation of documentary and pictorial evidence. Journal of Educational Psychology, 83(1), 73–87. doi:10.1037/0022-0663.83.1.73
• Wineburg, S., McGrew, S., Breakstone, J., & Ortega, T. (2016). Evaluating information: The cornerstone of civic online reasoning. Stanford Digital Repository.
• Wineburg, S., Martin, D., & Monte-Sano, C. (2013). Reading Like a Historian: Teaching Literacy in Middle and High School History Classrooms (2nd ed.). Teachers College Press.
• Breakstone, J., Smith, M., Wineburg, S., Rapaport, A., Carle, J., Garland, M., & Saavedra, A. (2021). Students' civic online reasoning: A national portrait. Educational Researcher, 50(8), 505-515. doi:10.3102/0013189x211017495