New York State Test Prep Social Studies 5 Content

Part three of the NYS Social Studies test is made up of a DBQ essay with scaffolding questions. The purpose of this section of the test is to test your ability to work with several primary source documents and link the information together to form an opinion or find an answer to a larger - "big picture" essay question.

Before you can answer this type of question - you need to know what it is! DBQ stands for Document Based Question with Scaffolding questions.

Okay, but what does that mean??????

Well.......let's take a look at each word.

Document

A document in this case is referring to a piece of primary source information. It could be a reading passage, a picture, a graph or chart or other types of information in its original form.

Based

Based in this situation means referring to - as in the case of the documents.

Question

A question is an issue or inquiry that requires a response to it.

Scaffolding

Scaffolding is a type of support that is put in place to help you build something

When you put them all together you get the idea that a DBQ is a type of question that you will have to build or create an answer using documents provided and your knowledge of social studies. You will write your answer to this question in essay form.

Let's look at how to answer a DBQ. You may notice that the first step is just like the first step for answering a multiple choice question - READ THE QUESTION CAREFULLY!! You may think it is silly to keep reminding you to do that - but, many mistakes are made NOT because you didn't know the information, but because you did not take the time to READ the question CAREFULLY and therefore made a silly mistake - but - it was still counted as a mistake!

Step 1:

READ the question carefully! Many students rush through this part and end up not understanding what the question is really asking you to do.

READ! READ! READ!

Even though this is a timed test - you will waste more time by not READING the question carefully. This is VERY IMPORTANT!

Look at the question below. Read it carefully. What is it asking you to do? What are the most important parts of this question?

You will find many DBQs at the end of the social studies lessons in Grades 3 and 4. Practice is the key to success!

analyze - when you analyze something, you look at it very closely, you look at all the parts or ideas and explain how they are related.

literal - means word for word or exactly, the answer is exactly what the passage says

inference - when you use the information given in passage to make a generalization of what is going on without it being specifically stated.