Assignment 1: Evaluating Sources for a Historical Topic
Due: Week 3
Points: 105

Skill(s) Being Assessed: Problem Solving

• Identify sources relevant to your topic.
• Identify key elements of the documents (who, what, when, why).
• Effectively identify biases and perspectives of your sources.
• Effectively identify facts present in the sources.
• Effectively identify why the source is credible.

What to submit/deliverables: Questions submitted in Chapter 3 of the webtext.

What is the value of doing this assignment? This assignment gives you an opportunity to practice the skill of problem solving. It will show that you can find and evaluate relevant, reliable, and credible sources. Problem solving is a universal skill and one you will continue to refine as you progress throughout your career. This assignment asks you to use what you’ve learned in the first three weeks of the course about finding and evaluating sources. Worried about where to start? The good news is that you’ve already laid the foundation with the webtext activities in Chapters 1 and 2. This assignment will use what you wrote in those activities to help you record your response.

Your goal for this assignment is to: Practice your problem solving skill. You will do this by applying what you know about sourcing to evaluate sources on your chosen topic.

What you need to complete this assignment:

• Your chosen issue and topic from Chapters 1 and 2 of the webtext.
• The answers you provided in Chapter 3 of the webtext.
• Your completed assignment, downloaded from Chapter 3 of the webtext and uploaded and submitted to Assignment 1 in Week 3 of Blackboard.

Steps to complete: In Week 3, complete the assignment and submit it to the Week 3 Assignment 1 link in Blackboard using the following steps:

STEP 1: Review the scenario:

Imagine you represent your company at a service organization dealing with one of these two issues: Facing Economic Change or Engaging Civil Rights. Your supervisor has asked you to research information related to the history of one of these issues for your organization to help new employees and volunteers understand it better. Your predecessor already started a list of sample primary and secondary sources and collections of sources.

In this assignment, you will take the first step in creating your presentation to help new employees and volunteers understand how historical events can be applied to one of the issues currently affecting your organization. To do the research necessary for your presentation, you will need to choose four sources that are credible and relevant for the issue facing your organization.

STEP 2: Using the writing templates in Chapters 1 and 2 of the webtext, you will select the specific issue or topic you want to address and identify key words that can focus your search for and identification of sources.

STEP 3: Then, from a collection of sources, you will choose two primary and two secondary sources that have relevant information for the historical events you want to include in your presentation. To put together your list of sources, the webtext writing templates will guide you through a set of questions to evaluate the credibility of each one.