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Task ideas to help learners compare and contrast
Task ideas to help learners compare and contrast

Ideas for activities and tasks to keep your learners active and help them learn by looking at similarities and differences.

Caitlin Foran avatar
Written by Caitlin Foran
Updated over a week ago

In learning something new, it's best if we're asked to work to actively "make sense" of ideas rather than just read facts. This article offers a range of task ideas to help learners practice comparing and contrasting things to better understand them.

Learn more: Our blog post Active online learning explores what active learning is, why it works, and the different things we can ask learners to do to be active in their learning.

How comparing and contrasting improves understanding

Our brains are great at spotting patterns and making categories. This can have some negative effects (e.g. stereotyping), but looking for similarities (and differences) between things can help us understand them better.

For instance, as an infant learning to recognise cats and dogs, you'll notice what they share (hairy, four legs, tail). But it's often through comparing what they share and looking for the differences (meow/woof, smaller/bigger) that you're able to 1) distinguish between them and 2) understand more fully what makes a cat, a cat or a dog a dog. 

We can apply this just as easily to more abstract ideas or procedures. For instance, I might be better able to understand autocratic leadership through contrasting it with democratic leadership.

Categorising and comparing and contrasting allows learners to express and interrogate the distinctions they see between related items. It can be particularly effective at helping to identify misconceptions.

Example tasks to support comparing and contrasting

Let's take a look at a few options for how you might support active learning through compare and contrast.

Essay

If you're teaching a concept with no clear-cut definition you can use this as an active learning opportunity.

Example task where learners are asked to "Find at least three things the above definitions of managers and management have in common."

Or, if like the autocratic versus democratic example, you can get learners to compare and contrast.

Example task where learners are asked to explain democratic and autocratic leadership by comparing and contrasting given definitions.

Multiple choice

You can get learners to notice differences by highlighting an exception to a rule or idea.

Example multiple choice which asks learners to identify which of the items is *not* a requirement for good formwork for concrete.

Or ask them to identify just the shared rules between two ideas.

Example multiple choice which asks learners: Which of the steps below do these two procedures [managing risk and reporting an incident] have in common?]

Text highlight

Give learners descriptions of items and ask them to highlight similarities (or differences).

Example text highlight task which asks learners to highlight the sentences which show the similarities between PR and advertising.

Categorisation

Give learners a list of scrambled terms, images, equations, or other items to sort into categories. 

Example categorisation task which asks learners to sort planets into their types.

This is a great activity especially if you have items that can fit into multiple categories. 

Example categorisation task which asks learners to sort words beginning with C into whether they start with a "K" sound or an "S" sound.

You could also change this activity to include a column with "Both" so it is similar to a Venn diagram task.

Example categorisation task which asks learners to sort words beginning with C into whether they start with a "K" sound, "S" sound, or (in the middle column) both.

You could also include "dummy" items that don't fit well into any category to highlight misconceptions.

Example categorisation task which asks learners to sort examples of learning into "Behaviorist" or "Constructivist" with one example that belongs to neither.

Choice matrix

In this option learners compare and contrast more implicitly through looking at the pattern of check marks. To support learning even more, make the similarities and differences explicit through the explanation you provide in the feedback.

Example choice matrix task where learners tick the features of astronomical objects.

Numberline

One way to promote learners understanding of differences is to ask them to place things on a spectrum. This is possibly not the intended use or purpose of the number line task, but we can bend it a tad to suit.

Example numberline task where learners place the seven levels of personal consciousness on a spectrum (1-7).

Free highlight (draw on an image)

If you want to do a spectrum, but need something different than numbers, you could try getting learners to mark up an image. The letters or shapes you get them to use to label should be as simple as possible as writing long words, with your finger as a pen,  on a mobile can get tricky!

Example free highlight with a quadrant (personal vs economic freedom and legislated equality vs. legislated morality) and learners are asked to place the initials of political leaders.

Or you could get them to draw Venn diagram over the top of an image.

Example free highlight image where learners are given statements about Galileo and Newton and have to draw in the Venn diagram circles.

Remember, with image mark up activities you need to work a little harder with alt-tag descriptions for images which provides a text alternative for them and makes them accessible for screen readers.

What next?

You could create a social variation on many of these tasks by asking learners to share their categories or compare/contrast in an in-page discussion or talk channel. This is an effective approach if there is no "right" answer or categories are contentious.

Learn more

Want to see how else you can make the learning active? Check out our examples for Retrieval practice and Ordering and ranking.

For even more ideas for designing tasks, be sure to check out our blog post Many way with tasks.

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