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 ordering and ranking things to better understand them.

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.
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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.

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

Give learners a jumble of steps and have them put them in the right order.

Help learners spot or learn a pattern or structure.

Get learners to re-tell a story. 

Give learners an image of the process and have them choose the right labels.

You can get learners to fill out steps in a description.

You can set up a variation on 6-degrees of Kevin Bacon. In this way, learners have to find the similarities between events or ideas to chain them.

Or make it even more open (and a bit harder) by just leaving a start and end point and they have to fill in what's missing.

You could also add an essay task below for learners to explain their rationale and/or turn this into a small group activity in a talk channel.

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.

You could also use the number line task to prompt learners to consider different interpretations of character or theory. They could place traits, actions or quotes on a scale from -10 to 10. 

You could do a similar activity with leaders, theorists or theories. You could also choose scales other than "good and bad" you could choose efficiency, relevance, or any dichotomous pair really.  

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!

The example below is much more open-ended and uses a variation of the 9-diamond ranking activity. 

Using images can also be quite effective.

There's an endless number of variations on this sort of task. You don't always need to go for importance, you might ask learners rank the according to which image or statement sums up a text or concept best. 

Even just asking learners to pick out the n-th step is asking them to think about the sequence. And can, in some instances, be more difficult than simply ordering the steps.

You can create a social variation on many of these tasks by asking learners to share their ordering in an in-page discussion or talk channel. This is an effective approach if there is no "right" answer or the order is contentious.