Social Studies Inquiry, Skills, and Literacy
Domain VI tests the inquiry process and the literacy skills students must use with sources, data, and arguments. Questions ask how a historian or social scientist would frame a question, evaluate evidence, or communicate a conclusion.
Core rules
- Inquiry arc: develop compelling and supporting questions, apply disciplinary concepts, evaluate sources and evidence, communicate conclusions.
- Sourcing: identify author, date, audience, purpose, and point of view before using a document. Ask what the source can and cannot show.
- Corroboration: compare multiple sources; agreement strengthens a claim, disagreement reveals bias or context.
- Close reading: distinguish claim from evidence, detect loaded language, recognize omission and framing.
- Primary vs secondary: primary sources are produced in the period by participants; secondary sources interpret. Neither is automatically more reliable.
- Data literacy: read axis labels, units, and scale; distinguish correlation from causation; check sample and source.
- Writing: claim–evidence–reasoning; contextualize and address counterclaims.
Worked example
A 1917 government poster shows a menacing enemy and urges enlistment. Sourcing: government-produced, wartime, aimed at young men and their families, purpose to mobilize. It is useful evidence of propaganda and public messaging, not of enemy intentions. Corroborate with neutral diplomatic records before drawing conclusions about the enemy. Dismissing the poster as biased and therefore useless is wrong; the bias itself is evidence.
Traps that cost marks
- Treating primary sources as inherently accurate.
- Confusing correlation with causation in a data set.
- Committing presentism-judging past actors only by current norms.