As teachers, one of our primary responsibilities is to help students understand and analyze various types of texts. To do this effectively, we need to have a solid understanding of the text ourselves. This learning activity will help you develop your skills in analyzing texts and prepare you to help your students do the same.

These primary source excerpts are broken into 2 groups: Cuban perspectives and American perspectives of the Bay of Pigs invasion. Consider having students work in pairs or small groups to read, discussion and answer the questions for their perspective. Then have students from both perspectives share observations. Consider using a guided question such as "Why are views so different for the same event, especially of those who fought at the Bay of Pigs?"

Description: The attached unit has incorporated Media Literacy for Social Studies by scaffolding a variety of primary source document activities of varying perspectives on New Imperialism (1850-1914) which allow the studnt to identify possible bias or misinformation. The guided questions which accompany the primary sources ask the student to explain differing responses and to think critically about why those responses may be different depending on the context. 

Can a person be both admirable and flawed at the same time? In this lesson, students will look more closely at the character of Okonkwo. Students will figure out what his most admirable qualities are, as well as some of his flaws. They will also decide whether Okonkwo has the potential to be a tragic hero.

This lesson guides students through analysis of non-print media as a vehicle for argument.

In this lesson Students individually consider a visual text and draw conclusions based on what they see. They write about their conclusions and explain the evidence used to make that determination. Students will be able to analyze a visual text. Students will be able to develop and support a claim about the visual text based on evidence found in the text.

In this task, the students are not asked to find an answer, but are asked to analyze word problems and explain their thinking. In the process, they are faced with varying ways of thinking about multiplication.

After gaining skill through analyzing a historic and contemporary speech as a class, students will select a famous speech from a list compiled from several resources and write an essay that identifies and explains the rhetorical strategies that the author deliberately chose while crafting the text to make an effective argument. Their analysis will consider questions such as: What makes the speech an argument?, How did the author's rhetoric evoke a response from the audience?, and Why are the words still venerated today?

In this activity, students will focus on a letter written to Congress about Bloody Sunday in Selma, Alabama. Students will see that, due to television coverage, the author, Mrs. Jackson, was very aware of the events that day even though she was in a different part of the country: Brooklyn, New York. Students will also look at the author's tone and word choice to discern the kinds of images shown on television.

Use this assignment to help analyze a photograph on a deeper level and get a better understanding of media literacy.

This course focuses on alternative ways in which the issues of growth, restructuring, innovation, knowledge, learning, and accounting and measurements can be examined, covering both industrialized and emerging countries. We give special emphasis to recent transformations in regional economies throughout the world and to the implications these changes have for the theories and research methods used in spatial economic analyses. Readings will relate mainly to the United States, but we cover pertinent material on foreign countries in lectures.

Students explore the ballads genre by reading medieval ballads to deduce their characteristics, acting out the ballads, comparing medieval and modern ballads using Venn diagrams, and composing their own ballads.

Students will analyze photos for specific details that reveal the owner of a specific room.Then the analysis will include literature but will focus on literary devices and connotations.Also, students will have the opportunity to summarize text and then use evidence to support specific connotations.

The goal for this unit is to have students analyze a variety of sources on a current events subject of their interest, identify the different perspectives, and defend their own position.This is one lesson from a larger unit on Evaluating Media. This unit will also cover identifying credible sources, analyzing fake news and the role of propaganda, identifying the different ways news is communicated in different communities. This unit will take place in the beginning of the school year to help instill evaluative and critical thinking research skills as we discuss and explore our big ideas throughout the school year. The end goal is to have students create a digital resource for their topic that we can share out as an educational tool for others. We’ll be creating a padlet that links to all of their presentations (students will have their choice in medium, as long as it is digital) that we will share with our school community and ideally can connect and share with other schools and students. There is also a possibility of using PenPalSchools to share out final resources, but that would depend on getting approval from the district to utilize that website.

The goal for this unit is to have students analyze a variety of sources on a current events subject of their interest, identify the different perspectives, and defend their own position.This is one lesson from a larger unit on Evaluating Media. This unit will also cover identifying credible sources, analyzing fake news and the role of propaganda, identifying the different ways news is communicated in different communities. This unit will take place in the beginning of the school year to help instill evaluative and critical thinking research skills as we discuss and explore our big ideas throughout the school year. The end goal is to have students create a digital resource for their topic that we can share out as an educational tool for others. We’ll be creating a padlet that links to all of their presentations (students will have their choice in medium, as long as it is digital) that we will share with our school community and ideally can connect and share with other schools and students. There is also a possibility of using PenPalSchools to share out final resources, but that would depend on getting approval from the district to utilize that website.

A statistics lesson on describing and making claims from data representations, specifically linearly increasing data. Applies ideas of rate-of-change to develop writing a linear equation to fit the data, using the equation to interpolate and extrapolate additional information, and integrating the mathematical interpretation appropriately into a social sciences argument.

Students analyze images of Oscar Wilde used to publicize his 1882 American lecture tour. They then compare a caricature to another researched image, sharing this analysis in a podcast.

An example of simplifying a seemingly complicated resistor circuit. Created by Willy McAllister.

This quarter-long project forms the basis of a third-year course for majors and nonmajors at the University of Washington, Bothell called Science Methods and Practice. Students use databases to identify novel research questions, and extract data to test their hypotheses. They frame the question with primary literature, address the questions with inferential statistics, and discuss the results with more primary literature. The product is a scientific paper; each step of the process is scaffolded and evaluated. Given time limitations, we avoid devoting time to data collection; instead, we sharpen
students' ability to make sense of a large body of quantitative data, a situation they may rarely have encountered.

We treat statistics with a strictly conceptual, pragmatic, and abbreviated approach; i.e., we ask students to know which basic test to choose to assess a linear relationship vs. a difference between two means. We stress the need for a normal distribution
in order to use these tests, and how to interpret the results; we leave the rest for stats courses, and we do not teach the mathematics. This approach proves beneficial even to those who have already had a statistics course, because it is often the first time
they make decisions about applying statistics to their own research questions.

We incorporate peer review and collaborative work throughout the quarter. We form collaborative groups around the research questions they ask, enabling them to share primary literature they find, and preparing them well to review each other's writing. We encourage them to cite each other's work. They write formal peer reviews of each other's papers, and they submit their final paper with a letter-to-the-editor highlighting how their research has addressed previous feedback.

A major advantage of this course is that an instructor can easily modify it to suit any area of expertise. Students have worked with data about how a snail's morphology changes in response to its environment (Price, 2012), how students understand genetic drift (Price et al. 2014), maximum body size in the fossil record (Payne et al. 2008), range shifts (Ettinger et al. 2011), and urban crop pollination (Waters and Clifford 2014).

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Checklist that can be used as a guide in analyzing the assignment examples