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Helping Students Examine Similarities and Differences
"Your students’ abilities to interact with content while processing that content by comparing, classifying, and creating metaphors or analogies enables them to constantly add new content knowledge to previously learned material in their long-term memories, thereby creating new and deeper knowledge."
~ Dr. Robert Marzano and Connie Scoles West
Desired Effect
Students can examine and explain similarities and differences and what new information they have learned as a result of their comparisons.
Purpose
- Being able to see similarities and differences between topics allows students to discover patterns and make connections, which is fundamental to cognitive processes. Strategies aimed at examining similarities and differences can boost student achievement by creating opportunities for students to link, connect, and synthesize ideas in order to deepen their understanding of the content. These strategies can lead to engagement of rich discussions, which link ideas and foster student construction of new insights.
- Examining similarities and differences assists students in identifying characteristics and understanding relationships between objects, people, places, or ideas. In the classroom, this strategy is recognizable in four forms: comparing, classifying, creating metaphors, and creating analogies.
- Helping student examine similarities and differences cannot nor should occur in isolation.
- Examining similarities and differences allows students to deepen their understanding of critical content by using discrete cognitive processes such as comparing, classifying, creating metaphors and creating analogies. Since these are more cognitively complex activities, it is imperative that students work through the critical content by first engaging in the elements in Design Question 2, processing, elaborating, recording, and reflecting on new content.
Teacher Evidence for Examining Similarities and Differences
Student Evidence for Examining Similarities and Differences
- Engages students in activities that require students to examine similarities and differences
- Comparison activities
- Classifying activities
- Analogy activities
- Metaphor activities
- Identifying basic relationships between ideas that deepen knowledge
- Generating and manipulating mental images that deepen knowledge
- Asks students to summarize what they have learned from the activity.
- Asks students to linguistically and non-linguistically represent similarities and differences.
- Asks students to explain how the activity has added to their understanding.
- Asks students to draw conclusions after the examination of similarities and differences.
- Create analogies and/or metaphors that reflect their depth of understanding.
- Demonstrates a deepen of understanding during comparison and classification activities through...
- Group Activities
- Artifacts
- Responses
- Evidence Presented
Scale
Strategies
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