📚Unit Plans→🔎Evidence, Sources & Truth
Years 12–13Social Sciences

Evidence, Sources & Truth

A self-directed senior bridge for learning how knowledge becomes evidence — from primary and secondary sources to provenance, bias, corroboration, archival silences and AI-generated synthesis.

This is a bridge, not a remedial course

You may be entering Year 12 or 13 without much previous History or Social Sciences experience. Or you may already know the basics and want stronger research habits. Start with the diagnostic. If you can justify what you already know, skip forward.

Senior expectation: this unit will not stop at “primary = good” or “biased = bad”. You will learn to ask what a source can establish, how it reached you, what it leaves out, and how far a claim has travelled from the evidence.

Four questions that run through the whole unit

Where did this come from?Creator, date, context, pathway and provenance.
What can it actually tell me?Usefulness is always tied to a specific question or claim.
What would make me believe it?Corroboration, independence, method and limits.
Can I trace the claim home?Especially when search, social media or generative AI mediates the evidence.
TRACE THE CLAIM HOME.

Learning route

Module 0

Diagnostic

Show what you already know. Route yourself past basics you can genuinely justify.

Start here →
Module 1

Primary, secondary, tertiary

Learn the conventional categories — then learn why the research question can change the classification.

Open module →
Module 2

Provenance

WHO? WHEN? WHERE? WHY? FOR WHOM? HOW DID IT REACH ME?

Open module →
Module 3

Finding evidence

Move upstream from broad search to repositories, scholarship, citations and original evidence.

Open module →
Module 4

Bias & perspective

Stop treating bias as a contamination score. Ask what a perspective reveals and obscures.

Open module →
Module 5

Reliability & corroboration

Reliable for what claim? Learn why ten copies of one upstream source are still one chain of evidence.

Open module →
Module 6

Archives & silences

Ask who gets recorded, preserved, indexed and cited — and what absence can and cannot mean.

Open module →
Module 7

AI & epistemic distance

Generative AI is not simply a “tertiary source”. Learn what is gained and lost when synthesis hides provenance.

Open module →
Module 8

Evidence Brief

Build a defensible evidence chain and state both what the evidence supports and what it does not.

Open capstone →
Year 13 extension: modules include optional deeper prompts on historiography, epistemology, positionality, archival power, methodological limitation and algorithmic mediation. Year 12 students can use them too. They are not a separate “hard” track.

Reusable tools

Source Analysis Matrix Trace the Claim Home Evidence Brief Template Guided Source Hunt Kaiako Companion

Research gateways in Aotearoa

These are starting points for finding real evidence, not automatic endorsements of every claim contained within every item they host.

Papers Past DigitalNZ Archives New Zealand National Library / Turnbull Stats NZ Waitangi Tribunal reports