The use of sources within history lessons has consistently been included within the National Curriculum in England and as a specific assessment objective at GCSE and A-level, on the grounds that unless students know how claims about the past are generated and validated within the subject community, they will be poorly equipped to make sense of or to discriminate between conflicting claims about the past. While the use of sources depends on a process of critical evaluation, history teachers and curriculum designers are now very aware of the risks associated with reducing such evaluation to a series of mechanistic formulae in which ‘source work’ is detached from the enquiry process of answering specific and worthwhile questions about the past.  The materials in this section help alert teachers to those risks as well as illuminating important misconceptions that may prevent students from developing a more powerful conception of the nature of historical knowledge The resources here offer a range of practical strategies, rooted in academic and practitioner research, for equipping students to use sources of many different kinds as evidence (rather than merely passing judgment on them). Read more