Identifying Similarities and Differences
When students identify similarities and differences in the content they are learning, they make new connections, experience new insights, and correct misconceptions. Engaging in these complex reasoning processes helps students understand content at a deeper level.
Two main generalizations can be drawn from the research on identifying similarities and differences. First, both teacher-directed and student-directed comparison tasks enhance student knowledge. However, if a teacher wants students to focus on specific similarities and differences, direct instruction is best. Second, using graphic or symbolic models (such as Venn diagrams or matrices) to represent similarities and differences enhances students’ ability to generate similarities and differences, thus enhancing their understanding of, and ability to use, knowledge.
There are a variety of ways to identify similarities and differences. Four highly effective forms of doing so are comparing, classifying, creating metaphors, and creating analogies. Identifying similarities and differences is implicit in the process of comparing, and it is also critical to classifying. To create a metaphor, a student must make the abstract similarities and differences between two elements concrete. In creating analogies, students identify how two pairs of elements are similar.
