Document analysis is the first step in working with primary sources. Teach your students to think through primary source documents for contextual understanding and to extract information to make informed judgments.
Use these worksheets — for photos, written documents, artifacts, posters, maps, cartoons, videos, and sound recordings — to teach your students the process of document analysis.
Follow this progression:
Don’t stop with document analysis though. Analysis is just the foundation. Move on to activities in which students use the primary sources as historical evidence, like on DocsTeach.org.
This tool helps students identify perspective in primary sources and understand how backgrounds, beliefs, and experiences shape point of view.
These worksheets were revised in February, 2017. Please let us know if you have feedback. If you prefer the previous version of the worksheets, you can download them below.
Materials created by the National Archives and Records Administration are in the public domain.
This page was last reviewed on April 6, 2023.
Contact us with questions or comments.