Lesson plan
Why Historians Disagree About Numbers
Grade band: upper secondary · 50 minutes
Objectives
- Explain why estimates of the trade's scale vary.
- Evaluate how a figure is produced and what it counts.
- Practise citing a number responsibly.
Materials
- Short text on how records survive and how estimates are made
- Access to a scholarly voyages database or printed screenshots of its methods page
- Worksheet on counting questions
Steps
- Ask students why it might be hard to count something that happened centuries ago, and list their ideas.
- Introduce the reasons estimates vary: incomplete records, concealed trade, different definitions and methods.
- Explore a scholarly database or its methods page in pairs and note one thing it can tell us and one it cannot.
- Complete the worksheet, which asks what a given figure counts, who produced it and what assumptions it relies on.
- Discuss the difference between disagreement over estimates and denial of the history, and why the first is normal scholarship.
- Practise writing a sentence that cites a figure with its source and a caveat.
Discussion questions
- Why is a range often more honest than a single figure?
- How can numbers help and how can they obscure the human reality?
- What makes a database trustworthy?
Assessment
Students write a short paragraph explaining why two sources might give different totals, and a model citation sentence with a caveat. Assess clarity of reasoning, not memorisation of figures.