Chapter 7, page 162
Table 7.4:
Characteristics of trustworthy sources
Characteristic Definition Example
Position Occupation or credentials A general is better placed to give a
trustworthy account of troop
movements than a medical aid who
knows nothing about strategy.
Motivation Reason for the author writing the
document
A political opponent of Lincoln is
less trustworthy source about
Lincoln’s motivations than a neutral
source.
Participation How the author came to know
about the events that are described
A nurse who served in battlefield
hospitals is a more trustworthy
source of hospital conditions than a
nurse who was never there.
Date Time period in which the document
was written
An eye witness report written
immediately after a battle is more
trustworthy than an eye witness
report written fifty years later.
Document type The kind of document such as
personal letter, official record,
formal treaty, tabloid article, etc.
A New York Times article is likely to
be more trustworthy than an article
in a sensational weekly tabloid.adapted from Britt & Aglinskas (2002)
Recall from earlier in the chapter, educator Sam Wineburg (1991) gave high school history students
and historians a set of one-paragraph documents about whether the colonials or the British fired the first
shot on Lexington Green in 1775 to start the American Revolutionary War. When reflecting on documents,
historians considered the source of the document 98% of the time; high school students considered the
source of the document only 31% of the time. One student was reading an excerpt from a British officer’s
diary, and when she got to the end, where the source was listed, she suddenly exclaimed “Oh my God, it's
British” (Wineburg, 1991, p. 79). Historians, in contrast, regularly checked the source first before reading
the document.
Sourcing has become particularly important in the age of the Internet, where there are many
untrustworthy sources that put information on the web (Wiley & Bailey, 2006). When looking for
information on AIDS, an American Medical Association website is likely to be more credible than a
website published by a person making wild claims about contagion that are not supported by any scientific
evidence. But elementary, middle, and high school students may have difficulty discriminating trustworthy
from untrustworthy sites.
The examples in this section point both to the importance of helping students learn to check sources
of documents regularly and to the importance of learning what makes a source trustworthy. In later
chapters, we will examine instructional methods that can help students learn about strategies such as
sourcing.
Seeking corroboration. Corroboration refers to checking “important details against each other
before accepting them as plausible or likely” (Wineburg, 1991, p. 77). As Wineburg (1991) found in his