As a Civil War historian, I know the power of sharing primary sources with students to understand causality and intentionality in the past. For example, the former Chief Historian of the National Park Service has argued that few can read Confederate states’ declarations of secession and maintain the fiction that slavery wasn’t the major cause of the war (Pittcaithley 2006). Speaking to other politicians and their constituents in widely advertised conventions, those documents’ authors are very clear that they seceded to protect slavery, based on the context of the document’s creation alone.  

At the same time, they’re pretty reliable sources. As my students ask, if secessionists weren’t lying about slavery’s centrality to the causes of the Civil War, why would anyone else? But it isn’t always so easy for my students to pinpoint an author’s intentions, or how that affected our analysis of what happened in the past. I needed an engaging yet relevant way to teach students to not only summarize a source, but also analyze its reliability.  

A Method for Students 

Enter the SOCC analysis method. After I finished my first semester of full-time teaching, I attended a panel at the 2019 annual meeting of the American Historical Association, “What Are We Learning? Innovative Assessments and Student Learning in College-Level History Classes,” where Cate Denial (Knox College) and Lendol Calder (Augustana College) presented their experiences teaching primary source analysis. They used a method derived from educational psychologist Sam Wineburg’s research on historical thinking and on Bringing History Home, a history curriculum and professional development project partnership between the University of Iowa and Washington Community School District (Wineburg 1991; Wineburg 2001). They developed the SOCC method of primary source analysis, initially for K–12 educators.  

Wineburg’s research first broke down primary source analysis in three steps: Source, Contextualize, and Corroborate. An additional step was added later by Elise Fillpot and Bringing History Home: Observe. First, Source a document to analyze the origins and decide how the evidence should be interpreted. Note the date, author, and location of creation, and use these details to determine the intended audience of the document and hypothesize why the document was created. Second, Observe by summarizing what was seen, read, or heard to make sense of the meaning(s) of the source before placing it in context (Fillpot 2012; Denial 2017).

Third, Contextualize the source by placing it in context of pre-existing knowledge about the time, place, and theme. This step also helps assess whether students have internalized their course texts, paid attention to class discussions and lectures, and synthesized them. Fourth, Corroborate the source by placing it in conversation with other sources and identify areas for further research. This step also helps professors see what students understood, what they didn’t, and what they were still thinking about (Denial 2017). 

Adapting the SOCC Method 

I adapted the SOCC analysis to a pre-class reading assignment. Before each class, I assigned two primary source readings and asked students to submit one-page SOCC analyses on each beforehand. I reviewed their analyses for completion, not for accuracy, on a 5–10 scale, where 8 was the most common grade. It indicated that the student had addressed each question and explained their logic behind each answer, for each source. They also correctly cited each source with a bibliographic citation, which, in turn, helped them answer the Source questions. Because students read the sources out-of-context, mimicking the experience of working in an archive, I didn’t take off points if an answer was incorrect; instead, I made sure to go over the correct answers in class, where students received more context.  

Students got a taste of what it was like to be a historian by reading sources out of context, and they arrived to class prepared for discussion. In class, we’d discuss the sources during interactive lectures to review both the content of the source and the SOCC method together. Through regular repetition, I promised students, they’d get better at source analysis and reading for college (Wineburg and Reisman 2015).  

I’ve been using this method ever since I first introduced it in 2019, and my students are still gratified at mid-term when they see their progress, even if only measured by completing their homework faster. As my class sizes have grown, I’ve experimented with many grading methods over time to make reviewing and assessing the mass of SOCC analyses before class a little easier. (But that’s for another post!) Nevertheless, the SOCC method is so simple that it’s easy to adjust based on your learning objectives and assessments (Denial 2019).  

SOCC as Holistic Learning

After a few semesters of reading student responses, I began to hone in on the SOCC analyses’ potential for data analysis. After one or two tries, it’s easy to identify things like the date of the document and the author, but learning to responsibly extrapolate meaning from the Source steps is difficult. So, I adapted the Source questions, changing the fifth one from “What’s the significance of these pieces of information?” to “Based on your answers to the above, why do you think the author created the document? Who did they want to convince of what?” This re-framing directed students to be a little more skeptical of each document and remember to consider an author’s intentions. (See adapted questions in worksheet below.)

I also adapted one Contextualize question from “What connections can you draw between the document and other things you’ve studied/learned about?” to “Put this document into the bigger picture. What else do you know about this era from the course readings, lectures, and other assigned primary sources?” While this question can still be a big ask for some students, it better addresses my assignment structure by asking students to put two assigned documents in conversation with each other, even if they don’t have prior knowledge of the era. Then, they can use that context to explain why the document was created. 

SOCC as Data Literacy Assessment 

My changes to the Source and Contextualize steps make SOCCs even more useful as methods to assess students’ data literacy skills. Even without any prior knowledge on the student’s part, these questions ask students to evaluate the intentions of the data’s creator and collector, which Cora and I see as one of the most important indicators of a source’s reliability. In this way, SOCC analyses are not only a useful tool for historical thinking and civic education, as SOCC creators have long argued (Wineburg 1991; Wineburg and Reisman 2015); they can also be useful tools for assessing data literacy, particularly data identification. 

References 

Bringing History Home. 2025. “SOCC Evidence Analysis Guides.” General Resources. http://www.bringinghistoryhome.org/curriculum-resources/general-resources. 

Denial, Cate. 2017. “SOCC It! Primary Source Analysis with my Students.” Cate Denial (Blog). September 15. https://catherinedenial.org/blog/uncategorized/socc-it-primary-source-analysis-with-my-students/. 

Denial, Cate. 2019. “Sources in Conversation.” Cate Denial (Blog). July 23. https://catherinedenial.org/blog/uncategorized/sources-in-conversation/. 

Fillpot, Elise. 2012. “Historical Thinking in the Third Grade.” Social Studies 103 (5): 206–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/00377996.2011.622318. 

Pitcaithley, Dwight T. 2006. “‘A Cosmic Threat’: The National Park Service Addresses the Causes of the American Civil War.” In Slavery and Public History: The Tough Stuff of American Memory, edited by James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton. New York: The New Press. 

Wineburg, Samuel S. 1991. “Historical Problem Solving: A Study of the Cognitive Processes Used in the Evaluation of Documentary and Pictorial Evidence.” Journal of Educational Psychology 83 (1): 73–87. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-0663.83.1.73. 

Wineburg, Samuel S. 2001. Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the Past. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. 

Wineburg, Sam, and Abby Reisman. 2015. “Disciplinary Literacy in History.” Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy 58 (8): 636–39. https://doi.org/10.1002/jaal.410. 

About the Author

Amanda Laury Kleintop is an assistant professor of history and a 2025–2027 CEL Scholar. She specializes in the U.S. Civil War, Reconstruction, and emancipation. Her book, Counting the Costs of Freedom (2025), explores debates about compensating former enslavers in the US and profitmaking in slavery. It inspired her historical data and digital humanities project on African American soldiers in the Border States. 

How to Cite This Post

Klientop, Amanda. 2025. “Historical Literacy as Data Literacy: An Intro to SOCC Analysis.” Center for Engaged Learning (Blog). Elon University. January 13, 2026. https://www.centerforengagedlearning.org/historical-literacy-as-data-literacy-an-intro-to-socc-analysis.