Students come up with categories for data, ideas, concepts, or similar, which they want to sort and make sense of.
The method helps students organise information in a way that supports their further work.
Identify what is to be categorised. It can be something the students have produced themselves or something they are presented with. For example, it could be a list of ideas, a data set, or a collection of concepts.
In pairs or groups, students identify features and characteristics that recur across the data set, and write them down as keywords on a piece of paper.
Based on their keywords, students identify meaningful and relevant categories. They give the categories names that clearly describe their common features.
Students sort their ideas, data, or concepts into the categories.
Remember to encourage students to be creative and experiment with different ways of categorising.
Students can also present their categories to other students, who then give feedback. The students can then revise their categories. Consider using the Two Stars and a Wish method to structure the feedback.
You may also use this method alongside the Similarities and Differences method, for which there is a worksheet students can take notes on.
The method is used, among other things, in activity XXX
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