Digital DBQ Home Page

Welcome to the Digital DBQ site.  This site is designed to provide five document based questions that make use of audio, video, and image files. The questions are designed to elicit historical thinking skills like contextualizing, corroborating, and sourcing (Wineburg, 1991).  As a result, responses to the questions require historical analysis that takes into account multiple perspectives.  The DBQ's are designed to be more complex as the year progresses.  

These DBQ's consist of only the digital documents.  You might consider adding supports for reading each document.  Some examples might include adding a Google Form and asking students to rate the trustworthiness and usefulness of the document and explain their reason for their rating.  Here are two examples:  

Individual Document Rating

Final Ratings of All Documents 

If you are interested in reading more research on Digital DBQ's the following two articles are linked for you to read:

Manderino, M. (2012). Disciplinary literacy in new literacies environments: Expanding the intersections of literate practice for adolescents. In P.J. Dunston, Dunston, S.King Fullerton, C.C. Bates, K. Headly, K. Headley, & P.M. Stecker (Eds.) 61st Yearbook of the Literacy Research Association (pp. 69-83). Oak Creek, WI: Literacy Research Association.

Manderino, M. (2012). Reading digitally like a historian: Using multimedia texts to facilitate disciplinary learning. Connecticut Reading Association Journal 1,1: 79-82.

CURRENT DIGITAL DBQ's

Jeffersonian Ideals

Lincoln and Abolition

1950s Values

JFK Assassination

Gulf of Tonkin

This site was designed by Michael Manderino with support from  the Teaching American History Grant in 2010.  Michael Manderino is now an assistant professor of Literacy Education at Northern Illinois University.  He may be reached at mmanderino@niu.edu or on Twitter @mmanderino.