Description: Present students with a grid made up of several important categories and a list of scrambled terms, images, equations, or other items. Ask students to quickly sort the terms into the correct categories in the grid. Ask volunteers to share their grids and answer questions that arise.

Benefits: This approach allows students to express and thus interrogate the distinctions they see within a field of related items. It can be particularly effective at helping instructors identify misconceptions.

Examples:

categorizing grids 01

categorizing grids 02