The Library of Congress

MEDIA ANALYSIS TOOLS or worksheets guide students into deeper analysis of primary sources. View these tools at work in lessons to see how they might be used or adapted to your needs.

Examining a Life History guides students in preliminary reading comprehension of the document. Both lessons in the Living History Project use this tool.

Reading Life Histories in Brother, Can You Spare a Dime? prompts students to make inferences about a life history of a person in the Great Depression.

The Object Observation Worksheet can be used with any object, from an image to a piece of sheet music. Instructions are in The Photographer, the Artist, and Yellowstone Park, a lesson within the unit, Explorations in American Environmental History.

Several forms of the Photograph Analysis tool exist depending on the lesson focus, displaying its versatility and scalability.

• The Photograph Analysis Guide in Photojournalism: A Record of War introduces students to content analysis of images.

• The Photographic Analysis Form of the Mathew Brady Bunch moves the basic form a bit deeper, asking students to think subjectively as well as objectively.

• Photo Study Guide in Brother, Can You Spare a Dime? asks specific questions about the photograph.

• A Research Guide in Mathew Brady Bunch leads students into an examination of the event that prompted the photograph.

• Three worksheets in Turn-of-the-Century Child separate objective and subjective content analysis and add artifact analysis. Data Sheet One concentrates on objective observations. Data Sheet Two focuses on inferences. Data Sheet Three focuses on the image as an artifact in a collection.