Central Historical Question Evaluator Agent Skill

Evaluate a teacher-drafted central historical question for its capacity to drive genuine historical inquiry.

Context cost
5.3k tokensestimated from the bundle, loaded when it triggers
Bundle
1 file · 21.1 kBtext throughout, nothing executable
Licence
not declarednone named by its author
Last change
—v1.0
Servers it uses
Noneruns standalone

What it does

Evaluate a teacher-drafted central historical question for its capacity to drive genuine historical inquiry. Use when assessing whether a question will generate real evidence-weighing or produce shallow responses.

What this skill changes about the agent has not been set out here as a list. Its SKILL.md, shown below, says it in the author’s own words.

digdocument-based-lessonsdocumentationhistorical-questionshistorical-thinkinginquirylesson-design

The skill itself

A skill is instructions the model reads, so you can see what you are getting: below is the start of its SKILL.md. The front matter loads with every session, the body loads when the skill triggers, and the whole file comes with the install.

SKILL.md21.1 kB · preview
--- # AGENT SKILLS STANDARD FIELDS (v2) name: central-historical-question-evaluator disable-model-invocation: false user-invocable: true effort: medium # EXISTING FIELDS skill_id: "historical-thinking/central-historical-question-evaluator" skill_name: "Central Historical Question Evaluator" domain: "historical-thinking" version: "1.0" contributor: "Sean Hu" evidence_strength: "strong" evidence_sources: - "Reisman (2012) — Reading like a historian: a document-based history curriculum intervention in urban high schools" - "Wineburg, Martin & Monte-Sano (2011) — Reading like a historian: teaching literacy in middle and high school history classrooms" - "Wineburg & Martin (2004) — Reading and rewriting history" - "Wineburg (2007) — Unnatural and essential: the nature of historical thinking" - "Wineburg (2016) — Why historical thinking is not about history" input_schema: required: - field: "draft_question" type: "string" - field: "available_sources" type: "string" - field: "student_level" type: "string" optional: - field: "historical_topic" type: "string" - field: "learning_objectives" type: "string" - field: "previous_questions" type: "string" - field: "curriculum_framework" type: "string" output_schema: type: "object" fields: - field: "question_evaluation" type: "object" - field: "strengths" type: "array" - field: "threats" type: "array" - field: "revised_question" type: "string" - field: "question_type_analysis" type: "string" chains_well_with: - "document-based-lesson-designer" - "historical-document-set-curator" - "historical-source-adapter" - "sourcing-skill-builder" - "corroboration-skill-builder" - "backwards-design-unit-planner" - "hinge-question-designer" teacher_time: "2 minutes" tags: ["historical-questions", "inquiry", "document-based-lessons", "historical-thinking", "lesson-design", "DIG"] ---
76# Central Historical Question Evaluator
77
78## What This Skill Does
79
80Evaluates a teacher-drafted central historical question against criteria for productive historical inquiry and, if needed, suggests a revised version. The output includes an analysis of whether the question will drive genuine document-based investigation, identification of specific strengths and threats, a question type classification, and — where the draft has problems — a revised question with an explanation of what changed and why.
81
82The central historical question is the engine of a document-based lesson. In the Reading Like a Historian curriculum (Reisman, 2012; Wineburg, Martin & Monte-Sano, 2011), every lesson is organised around a question that requires students to investigate primary sources: "Did Pocahontas rescue John Smith?", "Was Abraham Lincoln a racist?", "What caused the Dust Bowl?" These questions share specific features that distinguish them from textbook review questions or open-ended discussion prompts. They are answerable through evidence (not just opinion), they permit multiple defensible answers (not a single correct response), they require the use of historical thinking skills (sourcing, close reading, contextualisation, corroboration), and they are genuinely contested (historians disagree about them).
83
84A poorly designed central question can undermine an otherwise well-constructed lesson. A question that has a single correct answer ("When did the Battle of Lexington take place?") requires retrieval, not inquiry. A question that is purely opinion-based ("Was slavery wrong?") invites moral assertion rather than evidence-based argument. A question that is too broad ("What happened in the American Revolution?") provides no analytical focus. This skill helps teachers identify these problems before they reach the classroom.
85
86The skill is an evaluator, not a generator. The teacher is the expert on their students, their curriculum, and their sources. They draft the question; the skill evaluates it and, where necessary, suggests modifications. This preserves the teacher's ownership of the inquiry while providing analytical feedback they might not generate on their own.
87
88## Evidence Foundation
89
90Reisman (2012) structured the Reading Like a Historian curriculum around central historical questions, describing the lesson format as a four-part "activity structure": background knowledge, a central historical question, historical documents with guiding questions and strategy instruction, and whole-class discussion. The central question was the organising element — it determined which documents were selected, what strategies were foregrounded, and what counted as a successful student response. Reisman's intervention produced significant gains in historical thinking, factual knowledge, and reading comprehension, suggesting that the question-document-discussion structure is pedagogically effective.
91
92Wineburg, Martin, and Monte-Sano (2011) provided eight fully developed examples of central historical questions in their curriculum text. Analysis of these questions reveals consistent design features: they are framed as genuine problems ("Did Pocahontas rescue John Smith?" not "Describe the Jamestown colony"), they use language that signals contestation ("Did...?", "Was...?", "Who really benefited?"), they are scoped narrowly enough that students can investigate them with a small document set (2–5 sources), and they are anchored to specific evidence rather than requiring general knowledge.
93
94Wineburg and Martin (2004) demonstrated the pedagogical power of a well-designed historical question through the Pocahontas unit. The question "Did Pocahontas rescue John Smith?" is effective precisely because it looks simple but is genuinely complex — the answer depends on how you weigh Smith's contradictory accounts, how you interpret the historians' competing analyses, and what you decide counts as sufficient evidence. The question invites students into a real historiographical debate rather than asking them to recite a settled narrative.
This is a preview of SKILL.md. Download or install the skill to get the whole thing.
In the file
SKILL.md2,934 words
Files1
Licencenot declared
Why you can read it

Nothing in a skill executes. The client loads the text and the model follows it, so a skill can be audited the way a runbook is — by reading it.

What it costs in context

Skills are not billed by the call. They are paid for in context: every token the instructions occupy is a token your code, your diff and your conversation cannot use. Here is what this one takes and when it takes it.

≈990
always loaded
The name and description, so the model knows the skill exists and when to reach for it.
4,285
on trigger
The instruction body, read only when the skill fires.
2.6%
of a 200k window
Ten skills this size would take about 26% of the window before you open a file.
050k100k150k200k context window

5.3k tokens, estimated from the bundle at four bytes to the token, held for the rest of the session once it triggers. Heavy. Teams tend to install this one per project rather than globally, and load it only when the job comes up.

Servers bill, skills cost

A server charges by the month. A skill charges once per session, in context, and then keeps charging it for as long as the session lives.

Before and after

The same question, put to the same model twice: once as it comes, and once with these instructions loaded.

No worked example has been published for this skill yet.

The procedure it runs

The procedure has not been set out here step by step. It is in the body of its SKILL.md: the start of it is shown above, and the whole file comes with the install.

Prose, not code

These steps are written for a model to follow, not executed by a runtime. It can still be told to skip one, and it will say so when it does.

Servers it uses

None. This skill calls no MCP servers at all.

Everything it needs is in the instructions, so it works in a project with nothing connected — the model reads the file and changes how it works with what it can already reach.

Its SKILL.md does not declare which tools it asks the agent for, so what it touches is whatever the instructions themselves ask for — read them before you install it.

What it asks for
Writes filesnot declared
Network accessnot declared

This SKILL.md carries no allowed-tools line, so neither is declared. A skill grants no permissions of its own — it can only ask for tools your client already has.

What it will not do

Every skill is narrow, and the useful ones say where they stop. These are the jobs this one is the wrong tool for.

What this skill is not for has not been published here. Nothing is implied by that: it is a section the author has not filled in.

What is in the bundle

1 file, 21.1 kB on disk. A bundle is text throughout: the instructions the model reads, plus the templates it fills in.

  • SKILL.md21.1 kB
What is not in it

No dependencies and nothing executable: a skill is text the agent reads, so the bundle is 1 file you can review in full before installing.

Install

Installing copies the bundle into your project. Nothing runs at install time — the files sit on disk until the model reads them.

# Central Historical Question Evaluator · 5.3k tokens when loaded · macOS, Linux mkdir -p .claude/skills && t=$(mktemp -d) && curl -fsSL -o "$t/bundle.tar.gz" https://mcprush.com/api/skills/central-historical-question-evaluator/bundle.tar.gz && tar -xzf "$t/bundle.tar.gz" -C "$t" && [ -d "$t/central-historical-question-evaluator" ] && { [ ! -e .claude/skills/central-historical-question-evaluator ] || { mv .claude/skills/central-historical-question-evaluator "$t/.previous" && echo "Previous copy moved to $t/.previous"; }; } && mv "$t/central-historical-question-evaluator" .claude/skills/ && echo "Installed .claude/skills/central-historical-question-evaluator"
On Windows, or any OS with Node 20+
npx mcprush@latest skill add garethmanning/central-historical-question-evaluator

Windows PowerShell says 'running scripts is disabled on this system'? Run Set-ExecutionPolicy -Scope CurrentUser RemoteSigned once, or type npx.cmd instead of npx (codex.cmd, gemini.cmd, grok.cmd likewise). PowerShell 7 needs neither. Writes to .claude/skills/central-historical-question-evaluator/ in the current project. For every project instead, run mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills && t=$(mktemp -d) && curl -fsSL -o "$t/bundle.tar.gz" https://mcprush.com/api/skills/central-historical-question-evaluator/bundle.tar.gz && tar -xzf "$t/bundle.tar.gz" -C "$t" && [ -d "$t/central-historical-question-evaluator" ] && { [ ! -e ~/.claude/skills/central-historical-question-evaluator ] || { mv ~/.claude/skills/central-historical-question-evaluator "$t/.previous" && echo "Previous copy moved to $t/.previous"; }; } && mv "$t/central-historical-question-evaluator" ~/.claude/skills/ && echo "Installed ~/.claude/skills/central-historical-question-evaluator" (macOS, Linux) — or add --global to the npx line. The curl line replaces .claude/skills/central-historical-question-evaluator/ only after the download succeeds, so files left there by another skill of the same name, or by an older release, do not mix in. A copy already there is moved aside, not deleted, and the line prints where.

Which clients pick it up on their own

A skill is a folder of text. Most of these read a skills folder and pick it up without being told; the rest take the same folder another way — an upload in the app, a parameter on an API call — and then choose it by its description just the same.

Claude Code.claude/skills/
Claude DesktopCustomize › Skills
ChatGPTSkills › Create › Upload
Cursor.cursor/skills/
VS Code.github/skills/
Codex CLI.agents/skills/
Gemini CLI.gemini/skills/
Grok Build.grok/skills/
Microsoft CopilotSkills › Upload a skill
PerplexityComputer › Skills › Upload a skill
DeepSeek Harness.dsh/skills/
Zed.agents/skills/
Devin Desktop.devin/skills/
Windsurf (legacy).windsurf/skills/
OpenAI Agents SDKInstructions or sandbox Skills
HTTP / APIa request parameter
This release
Version1.0
Publishedno release date on file
PriceFree
Referencegarethmanning/central-historical-question-evaluator

Versions

v1.0 is what is on the shelf; no release here carries a date. Instructions change more often than APIs do — a skill can be rewritten entirely without anything it depends on moving.

v1.0
  • No earlier releases have been published to the marketplace.
Pinning

The install command always fetches the release that is current the day you run it — v1.0 today — and cannot ask for an earlier one. The copy on your disk does not change until you run it again.

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