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The Sheffield Graduate Attributes (SGA) card sort is a practical tool for academics and students to map and reflect on how learning activities develop key skills aligned with the Sheffield Graduate Attributes framework. The card sort activity uses tactile, collaborative methods to engage participants in identifying connections between teaching methods, assessments, and skills. You’ll learn how to use the activity to quickly assess strengths and gaps across modules and programmes, or to support students to reflect on and articulate their skills for applications or interviews. This activity has been successfully used across many schools and programmes in Social Sciences.
Louise Hall, Employability Hub Manager
Faculty of Social Sciences Education Team
Context
The Sheffield Graduate Attributes card sort is designed to help academics identify and reflect on how their module or programme supports the Sheffield Graduate Attributes framework. The framework is a set of 12 key skills or attributes, split into a further 36 sub attributes, which the university community and external partners have agreed are likely to be particularly beneficial to academic success, personal development and employability. As part of the Employability in the Curriculum Core and Enhanced Baseline, the University has made a commitment to ensuring that the Sheffield Graduate Attributes framework is reflected within module and programme design:
“Every module clearly identifies what skills and attributes are likely to be developed using the language and visual identity of the Sheffield Graduate Attributes. This is made explicit to students by staff through teaching and within the VLE.”
Why a card sort?
I chose a card sort for this activity as an effective way of engaging participants in topics that require complex thought and a sense of interconnectivity. Card sorting is a widely used method for prioritisation and classification in various fields, including education and design. It fosters active engagement and collaborative problem-solving (Rugg & McGeorge, 1997). The tactile and visual nature of the activity helps participants to focus and make informed decisions without the work feeling too abstract. Physically manipulating the cards helps participants to more effectively visualise and organise information (Spencer, 2009).
How it works
The card sort contains three sets of activity cards, each representing different forms of teaching methods (e.g. discussion seminars, lectures), assessment methods (e.g. exams, essays, artefacts) and other activities (e.g. group work, project work.) There are also 36 skill cards, one for each SGA, each with a definition of the SGA and some sample activities that use this skill.
Participants first pick three to four relevant activity cards for their module or programme and lay them out on a table. Working one by one, they assign the SGA cards to an activity, drawing on their experience of what students do in the module. For example, if ‘group work’ is a chosen activity, then the ‘Collaboration’, ‘Influencing’ and ‘Adaptability’ cards might be sorted into that activity, while ‘Academic writing’ and ‘Critical thinking’ might be sorted into a relevant assessment methods activity. SGAs that aren’t developed at all can either be discarded, or you can choose additional activity cards to reflect these.
You might find that an SGA is developed through multiple activities - in this case you need to choose which is the most important, for which it might be helpful to think about the activity that the students find the most challenging or engaging. Additionally, if you want to focus on a particular subset of the SGAs, you can just use those cards.
After you’ve created your first attempt, it’s a good idea to reflect on the outcomes and identify obvious areas of strengths or any gaps. You can also refine the sorting. The activity is good alone, but it’s even better done in pairs or small groups to facilitate discussion at this stage. A teaching team can quickly map the modules at each level of a programme and use it to discuss the overall picture.
This approach is a fairly rapid and engaging way to gain a high-level picture of how the SGAs are developed through learning activities. There’s a supporting spreadsheet which you can use to capture the information.
Finally...
There’s also a parallel set of cards that just has the SGA and the definition. You can use these with students in groups or individually to help them identify and reflect on the skills that they’ve gained in an activity. In this version, you can also ask them to discard cards until they’ve reached the 3 of 5 most relevant skills in an activity - this helps them identify the core skills that they can use that activity for in applications or interviews.
Supporting materials
Supporting materials
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