1. THE INQUIRY DESIGN MODEL SESSION 3:
Sources
These slides introduce the third component of the Inquiry Design Model™—sources.
The Inquiry Design Model (IDM™) features sources as the primary means by which students encounter social studies content and practice the skills needed to learn that content.
Sources provide the substance and the content for an inquiry. With compelling and supporting questions in place, along with a series of formative and summative performance tasks, sources complete the IDM model.
Sources can take almost any form imaginable. Most importantly, the IDM makes it clear that sources should have the capacity to support formative and summative performance tasks. Sources must also be carefully aligned with the capabilities of students. What works with elementary school children may not work in middle school or high school students and the reverse. More than any aspect of IDM, sources and the various pedagogical treatments of them are grade-level sensitive.
This section on sources includes information that might be useful in knowing how to implement inquiries in the Toolkit and to design new inquiries. The slides focus on:
The nature of sources
The instructional uses of sources

2. Part I – The Nature of Sources
What are sources?
What makes a source disciplinary?
What is the relationship between sources and tasks?
How do sources support work with knowledge and skills?
This slide focuses on the nature of sources by examining four questions about sources. Part I of Session 3 deals with the nature of sources and focuses on the following four questions:
What are sources?
What makes a source disciplinary?
What is the relationship between sources and tasks?
How do sources support work with knowledge and skills?

3. What Are Sources?
Sources provide information that is useful in answering questions
Three characteristics of sources
Information contained in a source
Composition of a source
Perspective or bias of a source
This slide provides more information about the question, what are sources?
The answer to the question “what are sources?” is not as straightforward as it might seem at first. The word source can mean many things, such as:
the cause of something
the beginning or place of origin
a manufacturer or supplier
Source can even be used as a verb, as in sourced or sourcing. The IDM holds that sources provide information that is useful in answering questions.
Sources in social studies have three fundamental characteristics that will, in part, determine how they are used:
the information in a source
the composition of a source
the perspective or bias of a source
Sources are useful because they have the potential to convey information to students. That information might be conveyed explicitly or implicitly. For example, a textbook source typically conveys information directly. As they read sources, students are engaged in interpretation. Some of those interpretations call for low-level inferences while others may be more high-level. The extent to which a teachers’ students can pull relevant information from a source dictates the type of support or scaffold that students may need.
The composition of a source is the second characteristic. Sources may include text, illustrations, maps, data sets, or photographs, but they also could be physical artifacts, people, or even places.
Finally, every source has a perspective or bias. Recognizing the perspective or bias in a source is important for teachers when planning inquiries and for students when using them in an inquiry.

4. What Makes a Source Disciplinary?
Sources have features that are distinctive within the disciplines.
Examples of disciplinary sources and processes include:
Political Science – legislation
evaluating public policies
Economics – data and statistics
This slide describes how sources are used in the social studies disciplines and how teachers can take advantage of the disciplinary nature of sources in an inquiry.
Social studies disciplines feature ways of thinking about sources that are useful when trying to understand how they can be used. For example:
Legislation and government policies are particularly useful in political science, thus evaluating public policies is important.
Data sets and statistics are common in economics, thus quantitative reasoning is important.
Maps and GIS data are representative of geography, thus spatial reasoning is important.
Oral history and diaries are typical sources in history, thus determining perspective is important.
Perhaps the most recognizable disciplinary feature of sources is the distinction, made most often in history, between primary and secondary sources. This distinction is quite useful when describing how sources function in an inquiry, but teachers should be cautious not to overuse that distinction as a way to categorize sources.
Presenters may also reference the C3 Framework for the disciplinary matrix found in the appendix ( This disciplinary matrix contains an example of an inquiry on the Great Recession, along with disciplinary sources that could be useful in such an inquiry.
quantitative reasoning
Geography – maps and GIS data
spatial reasoning
History – oral history and diaries
perspective

5. What is the relationship between sources and tasks?
IDM tasks are anchored by sources
Sources and tasks must work in tandem
This slide describes the relationship between sources and tasks within the IDM.
The IDM places great emphasis on sources. Each formative, summative, and taking informed action task is anchored by sources, and students’ experiences with and abilities to respond to the tasks will largely be shaped by their work with the sources.
When designing inquiries that follow the IDM approach, teachers will find that the fit between the tasks and the sources is critically important. This realization makes the selection of sources an important part of the planning process. The sources must provide students with opportunities to successfully complete the task.
The table on the left side of this slide illustrates one supporting question, one formative performance task, and three featured sources from the inquiry. This example shows that tasks follow from supporting questions and sources are useful for completing the task.

6. Source Work Follows C3 Inquiry Arc
If students are asked a COMPELLING QUESTION…
Students answer in the form of a SUMMATIVE
ARGUMENT
This slide shows how students’ work with sources follows the C3 Inquiry Arc.
Sources are important in all aspects of the C3 Framework and the IDM. Using the IDM structure and the Arkansas Social Studies Curriculum Framework, teachers can begin designing students’ work with sources across all four dimensions of the C3 Inquiry Arc so that they can produce a clear, coherent, and evidence-based argument as the summative performance task.
In the middle are the SUPPORTING
QUESTIONS, FORMATIVE
PERFORMANCE TASKS, AND SOURCES
Sources

7. How do sources support work with knowledge and skills?
Disciplinary knowledge and disciplinary skills are integrated within an investigation.
Source work is not easy.
On this slide, the role that sources play in blurring the boundary between disciplinary knowledge (content and concepts) and disciplinary skills is explained.
The distinction between disciplinary knowledge and disciplinary skills in an inquiry is necessarily murky. The C3 Framework encourages shifting instructional practice to integrate disciplinary knowledge and disciplinary skills purposefully ( Likewise, the Toolkit project aims to integrate disciplinary knowledge and disciplinary skills within an investigation. Disciplinary knowledge (content and concepts) is the substance of an inquiry. Without disciplinary knowledge, an inquiry would serve no purpose and would have nowhere to go. We inquire because we seek to know content and understand concepts. The IDM approach suggests that disciplinary knowledge is delivered through sources and is mediated with disciplinary skills. The IDM provides a mechanism for doing just that through the formative and summative performance tasks.
In social studies, sources are almost always human creations and typically were created for reasons other than the inquiry at hand. The nature of sources can make them challenging to work with, particularly for younger students.

8. Part II – The Instructional Uses of Sources
Sources can be used to
Spark curiosity
Build knowledge
Construct arguments
This slide introduces three instructional uses of sources within the IDM model.
In the process of an inquiry, sources can be used by teachers to help students at three critical junctures:
spark curiosity to initiate and sustain an inquiry.
build disciplinary (content and conceptual) knowledge through the use of disciplinary skills.
construct arguments with evidence.
These three uses of sources in an inquiry correspond with parts of the IDM blueprint: staging the compelling question, formative performance tasks, summative performance tasks, and additional tasks (i.e., extensions to the summative task and taking informed action).

9. Sparking Curiosity Sparking curiosity is about engagement
Focus on relevance and what we know students care about.
Use staging activities in an inquiry.
Nurture curiosity through sources throughout the inquiry.
This slide describes how sources can be used to spark curiosity in an inquiry.
Sparking curiosity is about engaging students as they initiate and sustain an inquiry. Just how to generate curiosity is, in large part, a pedagogical issue. The IDM suggests that sources can play an important role in helping students become curious about and interested in knowing more about an inquiry topic.
The use of sources to spark curiosity is closely connected with compelling questions. After all, one of the defining features of a compelling question is the question’s capacity to reflect one or more of the qualities or conditions that we know children care about.
Staging the Compelling Question activities that precede the first formative performance task can be a useful way to help spark curiosity, and sources can play an important role in these staging activities. Sources may continue to spark and even nurture curiosity throughout an inquiry, whether as a boost along the way or to move the inquiry in a new direction.

10. How would you use this source to spark curiosity?
This slide presents a source from a Toolkit inquiry to provide participants with an opportunity to consider how to spark curiosity.
Sources serve the purpose of sparking curiosity in a number of ways. Some sources might be confounding or might disrupt how students think about the topic at hand. Other sources might be interesting and intriguing. Still other sources might be familiar and recognizable.

11. Building Knowledge
Sources in an inquiry contain the disciplinary knowledge (content and concepts) students need to complete tasks.
Students use disciplinary skills when building knowledge.
Students gather information from the sources during an inquiry.
This slide describes the second instructional use of sources—how sources can be used to help build knowledge during an inquiry.
Like any type of instruction, inquiry functions to help students build knowledge. That said, inquiry-driven teaching approaches knowledge building with careful attention to the process. Through IDM, students encounter sources to build their disciplinary knowledge (content and concepts). What they learn from those sources is then useful in answering compelling and supporting questions.
Students use disciplinary skills when building knowledge. The nature of the source determines the type of disciplinary skills that are needed. Such skills are reflective of the ways of thinking within social studies disciplines: civics (political science), economics, geography, and history.
Students gather information from sources during an inquiry. For students to successfully build their knowledge, teachers may need to provide a wide range of supports and scaffolds.

12. How do the sources support the building of knowledge?
This slide presents a source from the inquiry with regard to how it can be used to build knowledge.

13. Constructing Arguments with Evidence
Inquiries result in arguments.
Sources contain information that can be used as evidence in an argument.
Students need support when determining what information should be used in an argument.
This slide explains the third instructional use of sources—how sources play a role in constructing arguments with evidence.
Inquiry leads to the need for arguments, which is a fundamental premise of the C3 Framework and a key feature in the IDM. In the inquiries featured in the Toolkit, summative performance tasks are designed with the expectation that students will construct and support arguments.
Sources play an important role in the construction of arguments. Arguments take form as a coherent collection of claims supported by evidence. Furthermore, as students become more sophisticated in making arguments, they should begin to include evidence-based counterclaims that acknowledge the other sides of an argument. The evidence for claims and counterclaims is contained within sources.
It is important to remember that not everything students learn in an inquiry will make it into an argument. Information from sources that is useful in making claims supported by evidence should take priority. Thus, teachers should provide students with support across the formative performance tasks as they build a storehouse of information that might be used as evidence.
Those formative performance tasks might also include some practice with making claims and using evidence, so that the summative argument is not the first time students have considered how to use the information emerging in the inquiry as evidence.

14. How do the sources support the argument?
This slide returns to the summative performance task for the seventh-grade inquiry on Uncle Tom’s Cabin to examine how sources are used when constructing arguments with evidence.
The summative performance task in the IDM calls on students to construct and support arguments, and sources play a big role in that process. Throughout an inquiry, students examine sources through a carefully designed sequence of formative performance tasks in order to develop the knowledge they need to make claims with supporting evidence.

15. Part III – Working with Sources
When using sources in an inquiry teachers should consider the following:
Selecting sources
Scaffolding
Adapting sources
This slide describes additional considerations for teachers when teaching how to use sources in an inquiry.
Part III is focused on three additional considerations for teachers when teaching how to use sources in an inquiry:
Selecting sources
Scaffolding
Adapting sources

16. Selecting Sources
Selection of sources requires deep knowledge of content
Where can we find the sources?
Archives, libraries, collections
Online
Through collaboration and sharing
This slide deals with considerations for teachers when selecting sources.
The selection of sources for an inquiry and their presentation for students are important considerations. Since sources serve as the primary means by which students encounter disciplinary knowledge (content and concepts), great care should be taken in selecting sources. Consequently, time should be invested by teachers to learn about the inquiry topic in the process of selecting sources.
There is no stockpile or perfect place to go in order to get sources. Unlike prepackaged resources such as textbooks, disciplinary sources in an inquiry can be found in lots of different places. A helpful place to look for sources is in collections assembled by disciplinary experts in libraries, archives, and other scholarly outlets. Many of the sources that teachers need for inquiries can be found online. Collaborative efforts to share sources among teachers are an important part of the process of building up collections. The Toolkit project took on this ethos of sharing by adopting an open-source approach to publishing inquiries.

17. Adapting Sources Approaches to adapting sources Excerpting Modifying
Annotating
This slide focuses on the process for adapting sources used in an inquiry.
It is rare that a source, as created, will be perfectly suited for use in an inquiry. Just a handful of the sources used in the Toolkit project were created with the inquiry in mind. Instead, most of the sources in the inquiries are being placed into duty as interpretative materials, thus changes to the sources were often necessary. Some sources, such as photographs, may be used as is in an inquiry, but many sources require adaptation. These changes can take several forms:
Excerpting – This approach involves using a portion of the source for the inquiry. Care should be taken to preserve information in the source that students may need to know about the maker and date of the source.
Modifying – Some sources may be difficult for students to read or view. In such cases, teachers may want modify the source by inserting definitions or changing words in the text.
Annotating – Some students may need annotations of the sources or additional descriptions.
Sometimes teachers will need to adapt instruction to help students who have various learning needs. These instructional adaptations may function differently from the adaptations of sources. For example, teachers may need to read a text aloud to students as an instructional adaptation.
Some may object to making changes to sources; they argue that changing sources does more harm than good. When considering this point, teachers should keep in mind the purpose of the source in the inquiry and ask themselves whether they are using the source for the source’s sake or to accomplish some other learning goal? It is probably rare that sources would need to be used just for the sake of using the original source.

18. Sources Require Scaffolding
Scaffolds provide novices with support for complex academic work.
Toolkit scaffolds were designed to support formative and summative tasks.
Analyzing sources in an inquiry involves literacy work.
Again, source work is not easy.
This slide describes why scaffolds are important for supporting students as they work with sources.
Scaffolds provide students with support as they complete complex tasks. The IDM encourages complex performance tasks and thus requires the consistent use of scaffolds. Such scaffolds can take many forms from “hard,” or very specific and repeatable forms of support, to “soft,” or less specific ways to support students’ work with sources. Soft scaffolds are dynamic and context-dependent. Such scaffolds emerge based on the needs of students in specific learning circumstances and are rarely used in different circumstances. Hard scaffolds are more fixed in their nature. Hard scaffolds may be used in a variety of learning contexts to support students as they engage in more general tasks.
Scaffolds can be teacher-created or they may emerge from research and have broad applications (e.g., SCIM-C, The Toolkit project makes use of a wide range of original scaffolds that draw on research and teacher knowledge about what works when students analyze sources.
The IDM conceptual framework suggests that social studies shares in the responsibility for literacy. As students work with sources in all aspects of the Toolkit inquiries, they will be using a wide range of literacy skills.

19. Summary
Sources contain information useful in answering questions, are disciplinary in nature, relate to the tasks in an inquiry, and support work with knowledge and skills.
IDM features three instructional uses of sources:
Sparking curiosity
Building knowledge
Constructing arguments with evidence
When using sources in an inquiry teachers should consider the following:
Selecting sources
Adapting sources
Scaffolding
This slide provides a summary of the session.
Session 3 focused on the nature of sources and the instructional uses of sources. Sources contain information useful in answering questions; are disciplinary in nature; relate to the tasks in an inquiry; and support work with content, concepts, and skills.
IDM features three instructional uses of sources:
Sparking curiosity and initiating an inquiry;
Building concept and conceptual knowledge through the use of disciplinary skills;
Constructing arguments with evidence.
When using sources in an inquiry, teachers should consider the following:
Selecting sources
Adapting sources
Scaffolding

20. Questions Tasks Sources
This slide shows the complete blueprint from the seventh-grade inquiry on Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
This workshop has featured portions of an inquiry on Uncle Tom’s Cabin with the compelling question “Can words lead to war?” On this slide is the complete blueprint for this inquiry. This one-page representation of the inquiry is called a blueprint because it puts forward the essential elements of the Inquiry Design Model. Note the way that questions, tasks, and sources are interlocking elements of the inquiry.

21. Pulling it All Together
This slide concludes the workshop.
The IDM describes a unique approach to inquiry in social studies. The model focuses on three key elements: questions, tasks, and sources. The Conceptual Foundations of the IDM put forward ten assumptions that support the IDM. These assumptions align with the key elements of the IDM as described below.
Questions
Inquiry begins with a compelling question that is both rigorous and relevant. Supporting questions support and extend the inquiry and represent the disciplinary knowledge related to the inquiry. The IDM conceptual foundation assumptions related to questions include the following:
Inquiry begins with a question.
Inquiry topics and outcomes are grounded in standards.
Inquiries are not all-inclusive.
Inquiries are best mediated by skilled teachers.
Tasks
Formative and summative performance tasks give shape to the inquiry through a sequence of activities designed to enable students to learn more about the social studies content at hand and to construct arguments in response to the compelling question. The IDM conceptual foundation assumptions related to tasks include the following:
The purpose of assessment is learning.
Students are active learners within an inquiry.
Content knowledge and disciplinary skills are integrated within an investigation.
Students need opportunities to practice engaged citizenship.
Social studies share in the responsibility for literacy.
Sources
The IDM features sources as the primary means by which students encounter disciplinary knowledge in social studies and practice the disciplinary skills needed to learn that content. The IDM conceptual foundation assumptions related to tasks include the following:
Disciplinary sources are the building blocks of inquiry.
Social studies shares in the responsibility for literacy.