Contextualisation Skill Builder

Build students' capacity to place historical documents in their temporal and social context. Use when students read sources without considering what was happening at the time, or know the context but don't deploy it.

What it does

Designs targeted instruction to develop students' contextualisation practice — reasoning about how the temporal, spatial, and social circumstances of a document's creation shape its content, meaning, and reliability. The output includes a developmental progression, an explicit instruction sequence adapted for contextualisation's greater complexity, prompts that guide students to connect documents to their historical moment, common failure patterns, and assessment indicators.

Contextualisation is qualitatively different from sourcing and close reading, and harder to teach. Reisman (2012) found significant treatment effects for sourcing and close reading but not for contextualisation (or corroboration) in her six-month intervention. She attributed this to contextualisation's abstractness: while sourcing involves a discrete action (look at the source note) and close reading involves attention to concrete textual features (word choice), contextualisation requires an inferential leap — connecting a document to circumstances that are NOT in the document itself. The reader must bring external knowledge to the text and use it to transform the text's meaning. This means contextualisation depends on two things that the other skills do not: possession of relevant background knowledge AND the disposition to activate it during reading.

Wineburg (2007) demonstrated this double requirement through the Harrison Proclamation example. A student and primary school teachers all possessed knowledge about 1890s immigration trends — immigration is taught repeatedly in the US curriculum. But when they read Harrison's 1892 Columbus Day proclamation, that knowledge was not activated. The Columbus node overwhelmed it. Doctoral students in history, by contrast, connected the document to its 1892 context within seconds — not because they knew more about Columbus but because they had the disciplinary disposition to ask "what was happening in 1892 that would make this document necessary?" This is what Wineburg called the difference between knowledge possessed and knowledge deployed.

This skill is rated "moderate" rather than "strong" for evidence strength because, while the research clearly demonstrates that contextualisation is a core component of expert historical reading, the evidence for how to teach it effectively is thinner than for sourcing. Reisman (2012) suggested that contextualisation may require more whole-class discussion and more explicit modelling of the inferential connection between context and document — but this was a post-hoc explanation for null findings, not a tested instructional design.

The evidence behind it

Wineburg (2007) provided the clearest demonstration of what contextualisation looks like in practice. Confronted with Harrison's 1892 proclamation about Columbus, doctoral student Matt's response was: "Okay it's 1892... Benjamin Harrison. The 1890s, the beginning of the Progressive Era, end of the century, closing of the frontier, Frederick Jackson Turner, you've got the Columbian Exposition coming up the following year. Biggest wave of immigration in US history. That's it." In under a minute, Matt had connected the document to five distinct contextual reference points and arrived at a hypothesis: the proclamation was about immigration politics, not about Columbus. A 17-year-old student reading the same document spent his time evaluating Columbus's character. Both readers engaged seriously with the document; only one contextualised it.

Gottlieb and Wineburg (2012) found that historians used contextualisation significantly more than non-historians (Z = 2.84, p = .005), and that the qualitative character of their contextualisation was different. Non-historians could sense something was wrong with a document (Reverend I noticed everyone in a Thanksgiving picture "looks clean and well fed") but lacked the specific knowledge to articulate why. Historians deployed factual corrections and disciplinary concepts like anachronism. Six of eight historians read Washington's Thanksgiving Proclamation as evidence of Enlightenment deism, while all eight clergy and scientists read the same language as proof of religious piety. This demonstrates that contextualisation does not merely add background information — it transforms meaning.

Wineburg and Reisman (2015) argued that contextualisation is constitutive of comprehension, not supplementary to it: "For the novice reader, the available information begins and ends with the text. For historical readers, the text becomes a portal to another time." They criticised Common Core implementations that reduced historical documents to "informational texts" and instructed teachers to avoid contextual questions as "non text-dependent." Separating Lincoln's Gettysburg Address from the Civil War, they argued, renders the words meaningless.

Wineburg, Smith, and Breakstone (2018) provided negative evidence: 94% of introductory college students ignored the 300-year gap between a 1621 event and a 1932 painting depicting it. 84% of upper-level students failed to recognise that an 1859 fact cannot explain why someone wrote a play in 1936. Students consistently read for content rather than context — engaging with what documents said but not with the circumstances of their creation. Even history majors showed this pattern, suggesting that exposure to history courses does not automatically develop contextualisation.

Reisman (2012) found no significant treatment effects for contextualisation despite significant effects for sourcing and close reading. Her explanation: sourcing and close reading are "discrete, concrete actions" practicable on a single document, while contextualisation requires making connections between the document and knowledge not present in the document itself. The near-absence of whole-class discussion in treatment classrooms may have limited opportunities to practise this more complex, dialogic skill.

Sources

• Wineburg (2007) — Unnatural and essential: the nature of historical thinking
• Wineburg (1998) — Reading Abraham Lincoln: an expert/expert study in historical cognition
• Gottlieb & Wineburg (2012) — Between Veritas and Communitas: epistemic switching in the reading of academic and sacred history
• Reisman (2012) — Reading like a historian: a document-based history curriculum intervention in urban high schools
• Wineburg & Reisman (2015) — Disciplinary literacy in history: a toolkit for digital citizenship
• Wineburg, Smith & Breakstone (2018) — What is learned in college history classes?

How to use it in your lesson

For the best results with EvidenceLesson, give it:

• historical_topic — The historical topic, period, or question students are investigating
• student_level — Age/year group and current level of experience with contextualisation
• current_challenge — What students currently do or fail to do when contextualising — the observable behaviour that signals contextualisation is not yet developed
• source_type (optional) — The type of historical source students are working with
• available_documents (optional) — Description of the specific documents students will work with
• background_knowledge (optional) — What background knowledge students already possess about the period — critical because contextualisation requires knowledge to deploy, and the gap may be knowledge rather than skill
• curriculum_framework (optional) — From context engine: relevant curriculum standards or historical thinking framework in use
• prior_instruction (optional) — What contextualisation instruction students have already received

Known limitations

1. Contextualisation did not show significant treatment effects in Reisman (2012), the foundational effectiveness study for the Reading Like a Historian curriculum. The instructional strategies in this skill draw on Reisman's post-hoc explanations and on the expert reading behaviours documented in Wineburg (2007) and Gottlieb and Wineburg (2012), but they have not been tested as an intervention in their own right. Evidence strength is rated "moderate" accordingly.

1. Contextualisation depends on background knowledge in a way that sourcing and close reading do not. A student cannot contextualise a document about the 1890s if they know nothing about the 1890s. This means contextualisation instruction must be preceded by or paired with content instruction. The skill addresses the deployment problem (students who know the context but don't use it) more effectively than the knowledge gap problem (students who lack the context entirely). Teachers should diagnose which problem their students have before selecting instructional strategies.

1. The distinction between contextualisation and presentism is pedagogically sensitive. Teaching students to understand a document "in its time" can be misread as asking them to suspend moral judgement — to accept that slavery was acceptable because "people thought differently then." This is not what contextualisation means. Contextualisation means understanding WHY people in the past acted and thought as they did, not approving of it. Teachers should make this distinction explicit to avoid the impression that historical understanding requires moral relativism.

Pairs well with