Social Studies 10-1 · Toolkits
Reading a source properly
Half of every social studies exam is sources — cartoons, quotations, photographs, charts. They are not illustrations. They are arguments, and the marks are for noticing that.
Why so much of this course is source analysis
Because almost nothing you will ever read about a public issue is neutral, and the useful skill is not detecting bias but reading around it.
A source has a maker, a purpose and an audience. A photograph was framed by someone who chose what to leave out. A chart begins its vertical axis somewhere, and somebody chose where. A cartoon exaggerates one feature because the exaggeration is the argument. None of this makes a source dishonest — it makes it a piece of evidence about what somebody wanted you to think, which is often more useful than the fact it reports.
The exam rewards this directly. A candidate who describes a cartoon gets almost nothing; one who names the technique, states the claim, and then evaluates the claim gets the marks. And unlike memorised content, it transfers to everything you read for the rest of your life.
Where it turns up
- Social media — the same techniques, faster, and usually without a byline
- Advertising — framing, omission and loaded diction, applied commercially
- Statistics in the news — an axis that does not start at zero is a design choice with an argument attached
- Every later social studies exam — the format does not change between Grade 10 and Grade 12
- 1. The words, first
- 2. A method that works on any source
- 3. What to look for in each kind
- 4. Writing the answer
- 5. What costs marks
The words, first
The idea: Terms the mark scheme uses, and that a good answer uses back.
| Word | What it means |
|---|---|
| Perspective | The point of view a source is written or made from. Not the same as bias. |
| Bias | A distortion in favour of a position. A source can have a clear perspective without being biased. |
| Purpose | What the source is trying to do: inform, persuade, mobilise, sell, commemorate. |
| Audience | Who it was made for. What is explained and what is assumed gives it away. |
| Caricature | Exaggerating a feature so a judgement is visible at a glance. The standard cartoon technique. |
| Symbolism | Using one thing to stand for something larger — a beaver for Canada, a bag of money for corporate power. |
| Juxtaposition | Placing two things side by side so the contrast makes the point. |
| Omission | What has been left out. Often the most telling thing about a source. |
A method that works on any source
The idea: Four questions, in order. They take about ninety seconds and they generate the whole answer.
- What is it? A cartoon, a quotation, a chart, a photograph. Say so, because the techniques differ.
- What does it say? The literal content, in one sentence. Get this right before interpreting anything.
- What does it claim? The position it takes on the issue. This is where the perspective lives.
- How does it make the claim? Name one or two techniques and say what each does.
Then, and only then, evaluate. Do you agree? What would someone on the other side say? A good answer does step four before step five, because an evaluation of a source you have not read carefully is just an opinion with a picture attached.
What to look for in each kind
The idea: The four questions stay the same; what counts as a technique changes.
| Source | Look for |
|---|---|
| Political cartoon | Caricature, symbols, labels, size and position, what is exaggerated, who is drawn sympathetically |
| Quotation | Loaded diction, who is speaking and when, what is assumed rather than argued |
| Photograph | Framing, angle, what is in focus, what has been left outside the frame, the caption |
| Chart or graph | Where the axis starts, what units, what period, what is being compared with what |
| Map | Projection, what is centred, what is named and what is not |
Omission is a technique. A chart of trade growth that begins in 1994 is making a claim about NAFTA by choosing when to start. Noticing what a source does not show is often worth more than describing what it does.
Writing the answer
The idea: Name, claim, technique, evaluation. Four sentences, and it fits the time available.
Weak: “The cartoon shows a large corporation standing on a small country. This shows globalization is bad.”
Strong: “The cartoonist draws the corporation many times the size of the state it stands on, and labels only the corporation. The exaggerated scale claims that transnational corporations have more power than the governments meant to regulate them, and leaving the state unlabelled suggests the argument applies generally rather than to one country. The claim has some support — several corporations do have revenues larger than the economies they operate in — but the cartoon presents power as direct control, whereas the real mechanism is competition between states to attract investment.”
Technique named, claim stated, evidence weighed, mechanism corrected. That is a full-mark answer and it is four sentences long.
What costs marks
The idea: Four, and the first is the most common answer markers see.
- Describing instead of analysing. What is in the picture is step two of four.
- Saying a source is biased and stopping. Every source has a perspective; say what it is and what it does.
- Ignoring the caption, date or attribution. They are part of the source and often the point.
- Agreeing or disagreeing before reading carefully. Evaluation comes last.