Project Participation Suggestions

  1. Whole Class Activity:  Find documents and create questions together.

  2. Have  students  create document based questions.  Evaluate them as a class and decide which ones will be used for this project.

  3. Have students work in collaborative groups to find documents and write questions. 

  4. Homework Assignment:  Find a document and create two questions.  Share with class. Class can select which documents and questions will be sent for publication on this project.

  5. Computer Club Collaborative Activity

You are welcome to print out this worksheet to help your students get started.

Follow-up Activities

  1. Use the scaffolding questions on this project to write an essay.

  2. Have students evaluate posted responses with this rubric.

  3. Students can create their own rubrics.

  4. Using one social studies unit, create a classroom scrapbook which will include all the students' documents and questions.

  5. Historical Treasure Chests: Students will be guided through an investigation with primary sources. There is also a wonderful page of reference materials and related lesson plans.

  6. Once the project has been completed, additional critical thinking skills can be developed. Choose a participant's set of documents and questions. Develop a third question that would indicate higher level critical thinking skills by reflecting information from both the document and knowledge of social studies.

  7. Have your students participate in Our Documents National History Day

DBQ Online Resources

* Check out For Students to find questions and primary document links.
Examples will show how the document pages will be set up.
*  Please e-mail  any online resources that you would like us to add to this page.