Historical Thinking Skills and Document Analysis
These skills are not a separate part of the test; they are how every part is scored. Part II constructed-response questions ask you to describe context, source a document, and compare or explain causation. Part III asks you to identify an enduring issue and support it with evidence from at least three documents. The same habits apply to stimulus-based multiple-choice items.
Core skills
- Context: the political, economic, and social conditions surrounding a document or event. A date alone is not context.
- Sourcing: author, date, audience, purpose, and point of view. Reliability depends on the question being asked. A propaganda poster is reliable evidence of the regime's message, not of conditions on the ground.
- Causation: separate long-term causes, short-term causes, and triggers, and distinguish political, economic, and social causes.
- Comparison: state a criterion such as causes, participants, or outcomes, then address both similarities and differences.
- Enduring issues: conflict, cooperation, desire for power, inequality, impact of ideas and beliefs, impact of technology, scarcity, interconnectedness, environmental impact, population growth. Define the issue, then trace it across documents and time.
Worked example
A CRQ asks how a document's point of view affects its usefulness. The document is a 1930s Soviet poster celebrating steel production. A strong answer notes that the poster is state-produced propaganda aimed at workers, so it documents the regime's priorities and message, while being weak evidence of actual output. That is a judgment about usefulness for a purpose, not a verdict that the source is unreliable because it is biased.
Traps
Quoting a document without explaining it; equating any perspective with bias; listing documents instead of connecting them to the issue; discussing an enduring issue in general terms with no document evidence attached.