Lesson Plan: Claim Testing

Students interact with a variety of claims every day, from claims their parents and teachers make to claims that they see on social media, in movies, or in the news. And since history is all about making assertions—backed by evidence, of course—it’s important that students learn the skill of claim testing early and use it frequently. OER Project courses equip students with the language and practice needed to analyze claims, including primary and secondary sources, data charts, videos, graphic biographies, in-class discussions, and even ones made on social media. In this engaging lesson plan, students learn about the claim testers and how to use them in class and in their everyday lives.

Lesson steps

1. Divide the class into small groups of three to four students per group and provide each group with one of the claims: world’s biggest horse, Chiefs players ban Taylor Swift, Airpods fry your brain, or Hawaii is not covered by NATO. 
2. Ask students to assess the claim. Students should decide if the claim is true or false and explain their reasoning for how they came to their decision. 
3. Have groups share their decisions and reasoning with the class. 
4. Then, inform students that what they just went through is a process called claim testing.
   1. Claim testing is an important analytical process for assessing the quality and accuracy of claims. It helps you “see” and evaluate the assertions that people make every day—in person, on social media, in the news, and so on. In today’s world, you are bombarded with information from so many different sources, which is why claim testing is an important critical thinking skill to have and use! 
      
      
      
5. Now, let’s meet the claim testers: 
   1. Intuition—This is often a gut feeling, something we experience when the support for the claim just “seems” right. 
   2. Authority—This is when we accept information or data from a credible or believable source. 
   3. Logic—Sometimes we test claims by carefully thinking about something to see if it makes sense. 
   4. Evidence—This is the available information we gather that’s usually presented by an authority on the topic and backed up with data or by other authorities. 
6. Ask students which of the claim testers they used to determine if their claim was true or false. Most will probably say that they used intuition and logic to figure it out. 
   1. Those are both important claim testers, but to ensure that the claims we see in history class or in life are correct, we probably also want to incorporate some authority and evidence. 
7. Now, it’s time to practice using the claim testers with a historical claim. Give student groups the following claim and ask them to use the claim testers to determine if there’s any truth to the claim. Women’s suffrage came as a result of political revolutions. Groups should first assess the claim using their intuition and logic. Then, they’ll use either the Internet or course materials, such as “A World Tour of Women’s Suffrage,” and find at least one authority and at least one piece of evidence to either support or refute the claim. We’ve provided some sample answers below. 
   1. Supporting statements: 1) The language and philosophy of Enlightenment thinkers such as Mary Wollstonecraft and John Locke inspired women’s fight for suffrage, particularly in European nations and their colonies. 2) Political documents such as the Declaration of Independence and Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen contained language about the equality of all people, but both women and minorities were left out of these rights. This led women and minorities to fight for equality and suffrage. 3) In Latin American nations, women fought alongside men for independence from imperial governments and women’s demands included suffrage. 4) Women such as Olympe de Gouges in France used the language of political revolutionary documents to argue that women should be granted suffrage under the new governments that arose after these revolutions. 
   2. Refuting statements: 1) While women were inspired by political revolutionary movements, suffrage came long after most of these revolutions. 2) Women’s suffrage in New Zealand, the first self-governing nation to grant women the right to vote, came not as a result of a political revolution but instead through the petition power of women and the temperance movement. 
8. Once student groups have fully tested the claim, conduct a class discussion about how they determined if the claim is true or false.
   1. Project the claim testers: intuition, logic, evidence, and authority on your board and provide a few sentence stems to support students responding to each other using claim tester language. 
   2.  “Is the creator of this source credible, why or why not?” “What’s the evidence for that claim?” “Can you explain the logic behind your statement?” “This makes logical (or intuitive) sense to me but I don’t have much evidence. Can someone suggest evidence to support this?” 

Conclusion

We encourage you to model claim testing for your students by making it a regular part of classwork. You might stop a video to ask about the support someone offers for one their claims; or you might ask students to highlight an article’s major and minor claims; or have them use claim testers to shape a discussion of a current issue in the news or in school.  

Want more claim testing activities, including a fun introductory activity about Taylor Swift, or more historical claims to test? Check out the Claim Testing Topic Page!