DBQ Skill Practice

Introduction to the Document Based Question and the S.P.Y. Method

AP African American Studies Course SKILLs 2C & 3B: EXPLAIN The significance of a Source’s perspective, purpose, context, and audience and…Support a claim or argument using specific and relevant evidence.

Objective: Students will begin the process of understanding the various tasks and skills associated with the DBQ. Students will also understand the significance of these skills in their everyday lives.

Notes

The Document Based Question (DBQ)

• 1 question

• 5 documents

• 45 minutes

• 12% of their AP Exam Score

The slides are not designed for you to go through the entire presentation in one class period. Rather, it contains one way that I introduce each skill to students over several class periods at the start of the year. The first slide contains links to different parts of the slide deck that focus on each section of the DBQ. I leave the slides posted in Google Classroom for student reference.

The S.P.Y. Method

The first year that I was an official A.P. grader, I was shocked at how few students in the country received credit both “supporting an argument in response to the prompt” or for “sourcing” documents.  I was especially concerned with how often knowledgeable and strong writers were not getting these points. These students knew history and wrote an overall solid DBQ with a great thesis, context, and outside evidence, but were only getting the document summary point and not the other two potential points associated with writing about the documents.  Students were working hard, but something about the way we teach the DBQ was failing them. While sitting in my hotel after days of scoring exams in a freezing convention center, I decided to ditch H.I.P.P. and created a new acronym: S.P.Y. Since then, my students D.B.Q. writing has vastly improved.