Historical Thinking Skills Flashcards
What is bias through selection and omission?
A journalist can express bias by choosing to include or exclude specific news items, influencing the reader’s opinion about the reported events.
Example: A speech can be described as ‘remarks greeted by jeers’ or the booing can be ignored as ‘a handful of dissidents.’
How can bias through omission be detected?
Bias through omission is difficult to detect and can be observed by comparing news reports from a variety of outlets.
What is bias through placement?
The placement of stories affects how significant readers perceive them; front-page stories are seen as more important than those buried in the back.
How does story organization contribute to bias?
Most news stories use an ‘inverted pyramid’ style, starting with the most newsworthy facts, which can lead to bias if important context is placed later in the story.
Example: If an article about mental illness in prison delays mentioning that sufferers are no more likely to be violent until the fourth paragraph, readers may form an inaccurate view.
What role do headlines play in bias?
Headlines can summarize and present hidden bias, convey excitement, and express approval or condemnation, influencing reader perception.
How does word choice and tone create bias?
The use of words with positive or negative connotations can strongly influence perception; for example, describing a hockey game as a ‘loss,’ a ‘close game,’ or a ‘near-win’ can lead to different interpretations.
What is bias by photos, captions, and camera angles?
Some pictures flatter a person, while others make the person look unpleasant. A paper can choose photos to influence opinion about a candidate for election. The choice of visual images displayed is extremely important, as are the captions newspapers run below photos.
How can names and titles introduce bias in news media?
News media often use labels and titles to describe people, places, and events. For example, a person can be called an ‘ex-con’ or described as someone who ‘served time 20 years ago for a minor offense.’ Whether a person is labeled a ‘terrorist’ or a ‘freedom fighter’ indicates editorial bias.
What is bias through statistics and crowd counts?
To make a disaster seem more spectacular, numbers can be inflated. For instance, ‘More than 900 people attended the event’ can be contrasted with ‘Fewer than 1,000 people showed up at the event.’
How does source control contribute to bias?
To detect bias, consider where the news item comes from. Information can be supplied by reporters, eyewitnesses, or officials, each introducing their own bias. Companies may provide ‘fluff pieces’ through news releases, and news outlets often rely on pseudo-events for coverage.
Historical Significance
Explaining why something is important, who was impacted, and how it is relevant to us today
Perspective
Identifying events from the viewpoint of people who lived through the times, while considering social, economic, and political realities
Cause and Consequence
Understanding the relationship between why the event occurred and the outcome
Continuity and Change
Understanding that certain things (attitudes, processes, actions) change over time and certain things remain the same.
How do primary and secondary sources differ?
While primary sources are the original records created by the firsthand witnesses of an event, secondary sources are documents, texts, images, and objects about an event created by someone who typically referenced the primary sources for their information. Textbooks are a great example of secondary sources, whereas audios, photographs, or artifacts from the time period are considered primary sources.
How to write a proper paragraph? (1st Step)
- Express a Claim/Point/Argument (Identify the main idea of your paragraph, and its relevance to your thesis or argument. Elaborate on the topic if it requires further clarification, context, or specificity.)
Erasure
Erasure is the practice of collective indifference that makes certain people and groups invisible. It is the tendency of ideologies to dismiss inconvenient facts (bad facts about their pasts), and is increasingly used to describe how inconvenient people (women, minorities, poor, etc…) are dismissed, their history, pain, and achievements are removed.
Revisionism
It is to go over historical record and modify it with a different perspective or new data.
Historiography
Tells us how the people participating in the event recorded it. This discipline focuses on the analysis of history.
Fact
A fact is a statement that can be tested by experimentation, observation, or research and shown to be true or untrue
Opinion
Is a person’s belief, feeling, or judgement about something. It is subjective or value judgement, and it cannot be proven. Words such as perhaps, sometimes, probably, often indicate the possibility of opinions. I feel, I think, I believe clearly point out that an opinion is being expressed.
Quotations, Paraphrasing, Summarizing
Quotations - Identical to the original and quotation marks are used.
Paraphrasing - Writing a passage in own words.
Summarizing - Involves writing the main idea in own words.
Thesis
A sole argument of the essay. This argument is the focal point of each paragraph. Typically to defend a thesis, three main points are needed.
Topic Sentence
The first sentence of a paragraph that tells the reader what the paragraph is about. If you have three topic sentences, they will relate directly to the three main points that were mentioned in the introduction.
Sources to use and avoid
Use sources like Jstor which has loads of explanation, and good evidence for each topic. Encyclopedia is good for high schoolers but they are more kid friendly, and summarized (missing out on some points) so it would not be good for university. Wikipedia is a good starting point to gain an overall understanding but it is not good to use as a citation, because public users have the option to edit Wikipedia so it may not be accurate.
How to write a paragraph? (2nd Step)
- Provide Evidence in Context (Choose your evidence source and summarize the context. Incorporate appropriate evidence to support your claim. The evidence may consist of quotations, examples, statistics, facts etc…)
How to write a paragraph? (Final Step)
- Analyze Evidence and Link to Larger Argument (Explain what the evidence means and how it connects to the argument in your paragraph or thesis statement. Focus on synthesis (connecting themes and traits that you observe in your evidence) and analysis (interpreting the evidence and its significance). This kind of work establishes credibility by showing that you understand the evidence and its importance in your argument.
