Worked example · History · Year 9
DCF: Producing → Evaluating and improving digital content
A secure Year 9 response, annotated so you can see which success criterion each part meets. Show it after pupils have filled their own table — shown first, you get thirty copies of it. The point to make when you show it: this pupil concluded that both extracts are biased, and still found one more useful.
| Question | Extract A — Valleys Heritage Voices | Extract B — britishindustry.info |
|---|---|---|
| Who wrote it, and how do you know? | No idea. There is no author and no date. All I know is what the About page says. | Also no author and no date. A directory with no named editor. |
| What is the site for? | “celebrating the fighting spirit of the coalfield” — it exists to celebrate, so it needs heroes. | “a celebration of the men who built British industry” — the ironmasters are the men it celebrates, so it needs the workers to be the problem. |
| Loaded word 1 — quote it, then say what it is doing | “butchered”. Butchering is what you do to animals in a shop. It makes the soldiers sound like they were carrying out a job, calmly, on people who could not fight back. | “mob”. A mob has no aims and no individuals in it. Calling 10,000 people a mob means you never have to say what they wanted. |
| Loaded word 2 — quote it, then say what it is doing | “greedy ironmasters who cared for nothing but profit”. It turns every employer into one motive, so nothing they did needs explaining. | “mercifully restored”. “Mercifully” says the reader should be relieved. It smuggles in the writer’s opinion as if it were the weather. |
| One claim you could check against the agreed facts | “Twenty-four innocent people were slaughtered”. The figure of 24 protesters killed matches the agreed facts. “Innocent” does not come from the facts — it is added. | “Sixteen soldiers were injured”. That figure matches too. So both extracts use real numbers and then wrap them in different words. |
| One fact the extract leaves out | It leaves out that the crowd burned the Court of Requests records and attacked houses on 2 June. That makes “peaceful” hard to defend. | It leaves out the 12- to 13-hour shifts, the truck tokens and the tommy shops — that is, every reason anyone had to be there. |
| Who is named as a person, and who is just a crowd? | Dic Penderyn is named and given an age and a job. The soldiers are “soldiers, hiding” — no names, no individuals. | The magistrates are “lawfully gathered” and the troops are “admirable”. The 10,000 are “rioters” and “thugs”, and only Richard Lewis is named — as the ringleader. |
Two loaded words quoted from each extract with an explanation of what each is doing, a claim tested against the agreed facts, and an omission identified on both sides. That covers the first three criteria.
| Extract A says | Extract B says | What the change does to the reader |
|---|---|---|
| “a peaceful crowd” | “a drunken mob” | Same 10,000 people. “Peaceful” makes the shooting unprovoked; “drunken” makes it unavoidable. Neither writer was there, and neither offers evidence about drink. |
| “the martyr Dic Penderyn” | “the ringleader Richard Lewis” | The same man, under two names. “Martyr” decides he was innocent before you read the evidence; “ringleader” decides he was guilty and in charge. The agreed facts say only that he was convicted of wounding a soldier and that 11,000 people petitioned for him. |
| “twenty-four innocent people were slaughtered” | “sixteen soldiers were injured by the thugs” | Both numbers are correct. Each writer keeps the casualties on their own side and drops the other. A reader who saw only one of these pages would not know the other figure existed. |
Shows that accurate numbers can still produce a distorted page — the bias is in selection, not in arithmetic. This is what lifts a response from “good” to “secure”.
Both extracts are biased, and neither is usable on its own. Extract A is the more useful of the two, but only because it admits what it is: the About page says it exists to celebrate “the fighting spirit of the coalfield”, so a reader knows where the writer is standing before the first sentence. It also keeps the causes in view — the Court of Requests, the debt — which Extract B deletes entirely. Against that, Extract A calls the crowd “peaceful” when the agreed facts say the crowd burned court records and ransacked a house two days earlier, so it is hiding something too. Extract B is worse on causes but better on one thing: it does not pretend the violence was one-sided, and “sixteen soldiers were injured” is a fact Extract A leaves out. If I cited Extract A in an essay I would have to write: this is a community history site with no named author or date, written to celebrate the workers, and its description of the crowd as peaceful is contradicted by the events of 2 June.
The verdict names a winner, quotes both extracts, uses the agreed facts to convict its own preferred source, and ends with the warning a historian would attach — meeting the fourth and fifth criteria.