CCEA A-Level History skills overview quiz quiz

Author or origin, date, and purpose or intended audience

The length of the source, its language and its overall page layout

The title, the footnotes and the list of references at the end

The cost of the source, its current location and its physical condition

It is always a completely factually accurate record of the events it describes

It is strong evidence of what a regime wanted people to believe

It contains no bias because it was produced by the official authorities

It cannot be evaluated by a historian in any meaningful way

The answers written by other students in the class

The published mark scheme for the examination paper

Your own knowledge of the historical context

The overall length of the source in words

Copy out the whole extract word for word before doing anything else

Count the number of sources the historian has cited

Reject the extract straight away as biased

Identify the historian's central argument in a sentence

They use different evidence, emphasis, questions or assumptions

They are never allowed to read the same primary evidence as one another

Only one of them is a real historian and the rest are amateurs

Interpretations are simply chosen at random with no basis

Describing in turn exactly what each of the two extracts says

Evaluating the arguments against your own knowledge

Choosing whichever extract happens to be the longer one

Summarising both of the extracts in equal detail

A brief summary of every single paragraph that will follow in the essay

A list of the key dates relevant to the period

A thesis stating your overall judgement and line of argument

A general description of what the period was like

A direct quotation, a precise date and the name of a key individual, with nothing further added

An opening introduction, a developed middle section and a rounding-off conclusion of its own

A primary source, a historian's interpretation of it and a short concluding judgement

A clear point, precise supporting evidence, and an explanation of how it answers the question

Narrating instead of arguing, and describing instead of analysing

Reaching a clear supported judgement and using precise evidence to back it up

Writing an introduction that turns out to be slightly too short

Including a few too many specific dates