WORLD HISTORY PROJECT 1750 / LESSON 1.

0 ACTIVITY STUDENT MATERIALS

CLAIM TESTING - INTRODUCTION
Preparation
• Print and cut out the Claim Testers and Supporting Statement Cards

Purpose
Claim testing is an important analytical process for assessing the
quality and veracity (truthfulness) of claims. It helps you “see” and
evaluate people’s assertions, and gives shape to one of the most
important and useful critical thinking practices in history. Since
history is all about making assertions, it’s important that you learn
the skill of testing claims early and use it frequently as part of
evaluating historical accounts and making historical interpretations.

Practices
Reading, writing
Being well-versed in claim testing will help you be a critical consumer of what you read. If you use claim testers to construct essays, your speaking and
writing skills will improve.

Process
In this course, and in everyday life, we encounter assertions or claims. At times, we believe we can take these at face value, but more and more, it is
important to question and test the claims that we come across. In other words, we need to decide if the claims are true, so we can determine what to
believe. In this course, we use what we call claim testers to help us check the soundness and strength of our beliefs. The four claim testers are intuition,
authority, logic, and evidence. Before we use the claim testers, we need to understand what they are! Look at the claim testing poster on the wall, and get
ready to review each claim tester as a class.

Now, you’ll practice with a claim. You are going to get a bunch of statements that support the claim: “There is one true history.” Your job will be to
determine which supporting statements match which claim tester. Before starting, think about the following example with your class:

The school board and the government require that we all take the same social studies classes.

What claim tester to you think is being used here? Discuss your answer with the class.

Now that you’ve practiced as a class, get into groups and sort the cards into the four claim testing categories and tape them to the grid in the areas
designated by your teacher. You will be asked to defend your categorizations at the end of the activity, especially for those supporting statements that
were hard to place in just one claim tester category.

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WORLD HISTORY PROJECT 1750 / LESSON 1.0 ACTIVITY STUDENT MATERIALS
CLAIM TESTING - INTRODUCTION
Finally, see if you can come up with any disconfirming statements that might help debunk the claim, “There is one true history”. Do you believe this claim?

Remember that this course encourages us to consider multiple accounts in history. We all have different perspectives, and that is often reflected in how
history stories are told. So, while there might be different stories about the same thing, it’s not necessarily because one story is true and another is false –
it’s about our perspective. And often, the story that seems more true is just better supported via claim testers - and that is why they’ll be practicing claim
testing all the time in this class.

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CLAIM TESTING - INTRODUCTION

“It is remarkable how closely

All textbooks are written by the history of the apple tree is
Teachers wouldn’t teach us
historians so they must be connected with that of man.”
things that aren’t factual.
true.
Henry David Thoreau

Things that are happening

“We are made of star stuff”
-Carl Sagan
pictures and proof of what is
We have historical records
right now will be history in
from the invention of writing
50 years and we know they
over 5,000 years ago to
are true because we have
today—put it all together and
we have one history.
happening.
CLAIM TESTING - INTRODUCTION

This feels right because

history is objective: It tells of It seems strange to learn an My instinct tells me that there
things that happen without untrue story in school. is obviously one true history.
bias or emotion.

I never read or hear things

We have primary sources
If I were to tell my own story in history like “4 out of 5
(such as pictures, diaries,
it would be true – seems like historians agree” or “99%
and newspaper articles), so it
all history must be true. of historians believe,” which
must be true.
means they must all agree.
CLAIM TESTING - INTRODUCTION

People say history is just like Everybody knows the history

We all have the same history
science – there is a right and of our country so you can’t
because we’re all humans.
wrong answer for everything. just make stuff up.

We have the science to date

We’re in a “world history” It seems like we’re all things and know exactly
class so there must be one interconnected in the world, when they happened, so
history of the world. so we must share a history. we all have the same
information.