In “What Does Data Say,” Cora Wigger described our pilot survey about how undergraduate students view, understand, and evaluate data. In the survey, we used a question that I often use in exams in my intro-level course on US History to 1865, which surveys US history from European colonization through Reconstruction. Assignments and course activities emphasize first-hand accounts, or primary sources, from a variety of perspectives to help students understand early America and learn the foundations of historical inquiry. It is also a Data-Intensive Course, which is a course approved by Elon’s DataNexus initiative that helps build students’ data competency across the university. As the only History course and the first non-STEM course to receive this designation, the class meets the following outcomes:  

• To think critically about when and what data are needed, assess data sources appropriate to the information needed, and identify the context in which data are produced and used.  
• To access, or collect when appropriate, data and explain the ethical considerations of how this data is collected and used.  

Analyzing “The First Thanksgiving” as Data

The course’s focus on data literacy made it a good option to disseminate our survey. When I presented the survey to my students, they had already seen some versions of the questions that we asked there, particularly a now well-known question among historians who use Digital Inquiry Group (DIG) assessments in their courses. In an assessment called The First Thanksgiving, students are prompted to respond to a painting titled “The First Thanksgiving, 1621,” by J. L. G. Ferris, created in 1932.  

The survey question reads: “The painting ‘The First Thanksgiving 1621’ helps historians understand the relationship between the Wampanoag and the Pilgrim settlers in 1621. Do you agree or disagree? Briefly support your answer.” 

Before I continue, take a moment to answer this question for yourself. When I attended a 2019 American Historical Association conference panel on history education, Lendol Calder (Augustana College), who uses the question to assess history majors in their first- and fourth-years of college, noted that this question is notoriously difficult for first-year history majors, and even graduating majors struggle to answer the question correctly. That said, I have yet to meet a historian with any graduate training who answered incorrectly. They answer with something along the lines of: “No. It was created almost 300 years later by who knows who, and can’t reflect the views of anyone at the ‘first Thanksgiving.’” 

This question is an important one to help students re-orient their thinking about primary sources as data. As reflected in the rubric DIG created for teachers scoring the question, it’s tempting for many to immediately look at what’s in the painting, and answer according to what they see (a “basic” response) or to evaluate the perspective or motivation of the artist (an “emergent” response). But a data-literate answer homes in on the date and explains why it matters, answering “like a historian” for a “proficient” response.  

I’ve graded many versions of this question in my intro-level courses, but rating the responses for our survey changed how I thought about how I scored answers. Now, my job wasn’t to grade the responses, but to ask: how does the answer reflect a student’s understanding of a primary source as a data point? When I did that, I started to see more nuance in student responses. Two kinds of responses in particular got me thinking about different ways that students are using information.  

1. Correct History, Incorrect Answer 

Given our interest in how data literacy shapes students’ understandings of human bias and equity, I was particularly interested to see number of students who correctly disagreed with the statement, but for an extraneous reason: they said that the scene depicted the incorrect history, sometimes calling it “racist” because the colonists were not, in fact, peaceful with the Wampanoags. These students are right to question the historical narrative painting shows, but the DIG rubric assigned this answer a “basic” rating and categorizes it “critical.” It’s the only way you can partially answer correctly by disagreeing with the statement but still receive a “basic.” While I’ve seen this answer in exam responses before, or similar answers where students use background information to answer the question, I haven’t seen the answer as often as I did in the survey responses. And, students who weren’t in a history class provided this answer more than those in the history course. 

In this response, we see how a student who understands that the painting portrays an inequitable understanding of the past comes to the correct conclusion about a source, but for a roundabout reason. The question we want students to answer isn’t about how you think about Indigenous history in the United States; it’s about how you analyze a piece of data. Even without background information, students can learn to use the information given to hypothesize the author’s motivation and the reliability of the source. While the students who answered this way are right to be skeptical, they don’t need that background information to be skeptical of the narrative being told. They just need to understand why the date and type of source—an authored painting—are important.  

These students’ responses also support the fact that Cora reflected on: data can’t speak for itself. It needs a human interlocutor. When we ask students to answer this question, we’re asking them to focus on the data points. Interpreting the painting comes next. The First Thanksgiving question can help students see that analyzing a source’s origins can help them understand past injustice at least as much as their prior knowledge or previously held values about an event or phenomenon because it teaches them to interrogate the motivations of the author and their own preconceived ideas (whether correct or not). 

2. Interpreting Art 

Consistent with the SOCC method for analyzing primary sources, The First Thanksgiving also asks students to analyze metadata first, and observe and interpret a source second. That means that students who want to interpret the art first skip a step, which happened a bit in the survey. One student disagreed with the prompt and responded briefly: “It’s just a painting.” If that were an exam answer, it would be insufficient to explain the students’ logic, which otherwise reflects the proficient “type of source” example in the DIG rubric.  

But it got me thinking about another student answer: “art encapsulates entire stories into a scene without words, and getting to ‘live’ in the picture helps you to understand the perspective of the artist regarding the story.” This response signals that the student thought about the ways that audiences interact with art, and the ways that artists anticipate that when they create a piece, distinguishing art as a unique kind of source.  

In fact, Cora and I rated the latter answer differently. Cora scored it an “emergent” response because the student recognized the “type of source” that it was. I, on the other hand, ranked it “basic” (though I would’ve given it some partial credit on an exam). Even though the response clearly identifies the type of source, it still doesn’t quite explain the logic outlined in the DIG “emergent” response because it suggested without stating that a painting is an artist’s interpretation while focusing on the audience rather than the source. It didn’t reflect on this artist’s perspective, specifically, or explain how the artist’s identity or choices might influence the outcome. Nevertheless, our disagreement raises another question: how do students evaluate art differently as data? Should we review their responses to art in the same ways that we review answers to other kinds of primary sources?  

Conclusion 

These two kinds of responses stood out to me as a researcher in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, not a grader. The DIG assessment and rubric is a great resource for assessing students’ ability to analyze a source like a historian. But there’s still more opportunity to bring into our project the data analysis tools of other fields, including art history, and to think about the ways that students pair their outside experience, or background knowledge, into data analysis. 

Acknowledgement 

Thank you to the Digital Inquiry Group for sharing their resources for this project. 

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 U.S. 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 

Kleintop, Amanda Laury. 2026. “The Pedagogy of Digital Humanities Ethics Statements.” Center for Engaged Learning (blog), Elon University. September 15, 2026. https://www.centerforengagedlearning.org/its-just-a-painting-what-student-responses-reveal-about-data-literacy.