Claim Testing
Teacher Resources
Lesson Guide
Each Big History lesson is different. Find lesson objectives, pacing, vocabulary, and teaching tips in this guide.
Claim Testing One-Pager
Read about this skill, its importance, and the thinking tools and feedback forms we use in the course in this one-pager. We also have a link to a handy placement doc to see where you can find the other claim testing activities.
Blog: How Can We Help Students Identify Disinformation?
Claim testing helps students make informed decisions about information they come across in the news, on social media, and in the classroom. Teaching students to test claims can help combat their susceptibility to misinformation and disinformation, and sharpen their historical thinking skills. Read more about teaching claim testing in this blog post.
Driving Question: How can claim testing help us evaluate the past, present, and future?
Claim testing is how you evaluate the truthfulness of a statement—in school, on social media, or in your everyday life. We use claim testing to make sure that information we hear and read can be trusted, and to help us make accurate claims about our world.
Learning Objectives:
- Investigate how knowledge is made, shared, and passed down.
- Define and use the claim testers (intuition, authority, logic, and evidence) to evaluate a claim.
- Practice writing claims.
Vocab Terms:
- claim
- claim testing
- discipline
- knowledge
Who knew donuts could be so educational? Help your students remember the claim testers by printing and hanging up one or more of these claim testing posters in your classroom. (Scroll to the very bottom for a sweet treat.)
A truth-testing tool awaits you in this lesson! You can use this tool every day to figure out whether something you hear is true or false.
AI Detective: Claim Testing
- Ask an AI agent to generate 8–10 claims about Big History, citing credible sources and data in some, but not all.
- Students evaluate the claims using all four claim testers:
- Intuition: Does this ‘feel’ right?
- Logic: Does the reasoning make sense?
- Authority: Does the AI cite credible sources or experts?
- Evidence: What data or research backs this up?
- Students can vote on whether or not they believe each claim. They should be prepared to defend their choices!
Behind the design: Explicitly teach students how AI works, where it fails, and how to fact-check its outputs. Make them AI skeptics in the best possible way.
The method historians use to decide if something’s true is called “claim testing.” Here’s how it works.
“Learning” isn’t just something you do alone, it’s something our species has done collectively since it began. Find out how as you read the article and complete the activity.
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Guiding Questions
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Before you read
Preview the questions below, and then skim the article. Be sure to look at the section headings and any images.
While you read
Look for answers to these questions:
- How did we build knowledge over time?
- What is collective learning?
- How do historians and scientists create knowledge?
- What are the steps people take to create or discover knowledge?
- Why do we need knowledge from different disciplines when we study the history of the Universe?
After you read
Respond to this question: What big questions do you have about the history of the Universe?
History often depends on forensics, a bit like the crime labs you see on TV. Use the materials below to see if you can solve the history mystery.
Want to give students more practice evaluating claims? Check out the How Do We Know Climate Change Is Real? data exploration and accompanying activity in OER Project: Climate.
Now that you know what claim testing is, it’s time to start practicing. You’re on the path to becoming an expert history detective.
You’ve covered a lot in this unit—you read a comic covering 13.8 billion years and learned about origin stories, scale-switching, claim testing, and more! How has your thinking changed?
Help students understand interdisciplinary thinking with these disciplines cards, which provide definitions, a list of jobs, and questions and evidence used by each discipline.
How do multiple disciplines help contribute to the Big History story of the Universe?
Disciplines Slideshow
