Use these oven-ready synthesis and evaluation activities to ramp up the level of challenge in your classroom and push learners to think deeply about the lessons you plan

Exploring Synthesis and Evaluation Activities

Here’s Bloom’s Taxonomy:

Level 1: Knowledge
Level 2: Comprehension
Level 3: Application
Level 4: Analysis
Level 5: Synthesis
Level 6: Evaluation

We’re going to look at the top two levels. Synthesis and evaluation.

These are always the most challenging things we ask learners to do, whichever way round you put them.

Depending on context, sometimes synthesis is more challenging than evaluation, and vice versa.

I have eight activities for you.

Four synthesis ones, and four evaluation ones.

Synthesis Activity 1: Create a Product

Ask learners to create something that allows them to call on a wide range of knowledge and understanding previously developed.

For example, you might ask them to create a guide, leaflet or presentation, an essay, poster, sequence of lessons, report or piece of individual writing.

Essentially, any reasonably large product is appropriate that involves the manipulation and bringing together of disparate pieces of information, based on the understanding learners have developed.

Our aim is to give learners an opportunity to use what they know and understand to create something new.

That something new will likely be closely tied to the lesson topic.

The scope of what a physics lesson might lead a learner to create is different from that of an art lesson.

To this end, while certain products can be the basis of a creation task in a range of subjects, other products may be subject-specific.

One point to consider here, particularly in a primary context, is variety.

If you always ask learners to create the same product, the task can become boring, losing its lustre.

Try coming up with a range of products – six, say – and cycling through these each time you use the activity.

Variety, after all, is the spice of life.

Synthesis Activity 2: Innovative Design

Challenge learners to develop a design that takes their existing knowledge and understanding as a starting point but then moves off to suggest something new.

Examples of design tasks include:

Designing an alternative
Designing a solution
Designing a different version
Designing a prototype
Designing an experiment
Designing a test
Designing a machine
Designing an advertising campaign

In each case, learners need to draw together the separate elements of what they know and use these as the basis for their new construction.

This is challenging but also tends to be highly stimulating and motivational.

For learners who might struggle with synthesis in general, exemplar work is particularly useful here.

A model can provide a great starting point for these learners, scaffolding the act of designing for them and increasing the likelihood that they will be able to engage with task at length.

Synthesis Activity 3: Can you merge it?

Ask learners to merge different ideas or pieces of information to create a complete whole.

For example, we might ask learners to develop a series of arguments connected to a relevant statement (analysis) and then to bring these together in the form an essay.

Or we might ask learners to take something that exists (such as a model of the water cycle) and to merge this with another idea or piece of information (such as a model of how industrial pollution contaminates sources of freshwater) to create a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.

As you will note, I have returned here to using the word ‘create.’

Despite this, activities based on the idea of merging are qualitatively different from those based just on creation.

This is because merging tends to refer to the coming together of two or possibly more different elements to form a new whole.

Create, on the other hand, retains a broader meaning.

Merge implies that those things being merged retain a degree of visibility within the finished product.

Hence what we are asking learners to do is subtly different.

(Think about when you are driving and you ‘merge in turn’. The act of merging turns two lanes of traffic into one. A synthesis. The cars that merged are still evident as separate items within this new development.)

Synthesis Activity 4: Plan Out Your Response

Ask learners to plan a response to a question or challenge.

Depending on what this is, there may also be the opportunity for learners to implement their plan.

However, it is the development of the plan that is itself the act of synthesis and, as a result, doing this even without having the opportunity for implementation is beneficial.

For example, in a religious studies lesson looking at Buddhism we might ask learners to plan a school event introducing parents to the key teachings of the Buddha.

We could caveat this with a challenge by asking learners to think about how they could make the event interactive and how they could ensure parents don’t develop any misconceptions as they take part.

This illustrates how planning tasks can be made more or less difficult through the use of additional criteria or caveats.

You can also help learners improve the quality of their plans by modelling what a low, medium and high level of detail looks like.

This helps learners gain clarity over precisely what they need to do to be successful.

We now move onto evaluation, where our focus is on learners making judgements.

Evaluation Activity 1: Assess It!

Challenging learners to assess something means asking them to look at it in the light of their knowledge and understanding and to make a judgement.

For assess-based tasks to be effective, that which is being assessed needs to be clear and, ideally, to have a sufficient degree of depth for a detailed decision to be arrived at.

For example, in a PE theory lesson we might ask learners to assess the quality of a proposed exercise programme designed to promote muscle gain.

Here, learners have multiple elements to consider when making their assessment, including the elements of which the programme is constituted and the extent to which these together would lead to muscle gain.

Self- and peer-assessment are also relevant to this point.

In both cases, learners are being asked to use their knowledge and understanding of the topic, as well as what good work looks like, to come to some sort of judgement.

Both these activities are most effective if the teacher takes time to train learners in what to look for concerning the latter, in how to successfully use mark-schemes or success criteria to pass judgements, and how to go from this to providing feedback.

(Without training, peer- and self-assessment can quickly drop down to a much lower level and lose their impact.)

Evaluation Activity 2: Give Me a Critique

Ask learners to critique an idea, interpretation, experiment, design, piece of writing or something else.

Critique differs from assess in that the emphasis is more explicitly negative.

While assessment tends to involve the weighing up of strengths and weaknesses, critiquing generally errs towards drawing out the various problems or limitations inherent to something.

For example, having spent a lesson looking at how to develop a healthy, balanced food menu, we might then present learners with a selection of possible menus which it is their job to critique in light of what they have learned.

This critique will focus on identifying the problems in each menu, with any points raised having to be justified with reference to the knowledge and understanding developed during the lesson.

Evaluation Activity 3: Mount a Defence

The reverse of critique is defend.

When we ask learners to defend something we are asking them to pull out all the strengths connected to the thing in question, as well as the benefits and the points of interest that set it apart from similar things of its ilk.

The process of defending a proposition, argument, idea, design, method or something else thus involves learners building a case for the item in question.

In so doing they must invoke all that they have learned and understood.

Doing this gives them a framework through which they can make their positive judgements and, crucially, attempt to persuade others that they are right.

For example, we might ask a group of psychology learners to defend the psychodynamic explanation of aggression.

In doing this, they will be compelled to build up a picture of the relative strengths of this explanation, even if they do not agree with it.

Or we might ask a group of Year 5 learners to defend the idea that the Vikings brought more positives to Britain than negatives.

A nice use of defend-style tasks is to divide the class into teams and to give each team a different, competing thing to defend.

This adds a sense of competition and fun, with learners working against each other to persuade the teacher (or the class as a whole) that whatever they have been asked to defend is, indeed, the best of the lot.

Extending the example above, we might divide the class into three and ask one team to defend the psychodynamic explanation of aggression, another team to defend the biological explanation and a third to defend the explanation provided by social learning theory.

For our second example, we might divide the class in half and ask one half to defend the idea that the Vikings gave Britain more than they took, while asking the other half to defend the opposite.

Two final points to note.

First, this same development (competing teams) can be used as part of a critique-based activity.

Second, critique and defend can be combined, with teams being asked both to defend whatever they have been given and, in the process, critique the positions of their opponents.

This is more challenging as it requires learners to attend to both sides of evaluation at once … but it can result in some impassioned debates!

Evaluation Activity 4: Ranking is the Way

We finish this section by looking at ranking activities.

You can call on these at various points of the lesson, but they will tend to produce better results if used near the end.

This is because learners will have had sufficient time in which to develop their knowledge and understanding of the topic, leading them to make more detailed, thoughtful judgements regarding the ranking of different items.

(With that said, a nice use of ranking is to get learners to rank a set of items at the start of a lesson and then again towards the end, and to see the extent to which their decisions, and their justifications, have changed based on the lesson content.)

Two things need to be considered in any ranking activity: what is being ranked and how it is being ranked.

For the former, almost anything is possible – arguments, ideas, approaches, factors, possible solutions, plans, theories, images, pieces of music and so on.

For the latter, a smaller range of possibilities tend to be relevant.

For example:

Rank the items from most to least useful
Rank the items from most to least likely
Rank the items from most to least relevant
Rank the items from strongest to weakest

When learners engage in ranking activities, they may be tempted to rank the items in question and then to leave it at that.

But this is only half the job!

To get the most out of the activity, we must encourage learners to provide a clear rationale for the decisions they have made.

They must justify their choices, calling on their knowledge and understanding of the content to do so.

A few variations on straightforward ranking are worth noting.

First, is the use of a ‘Diamond 9’ approach.

This is where we ask learners to rank nine items across five levels:

1 – This item is ranked at the top
2 – These items come next
3 – These items are ranked in the middle
2 – These items come next
1 – This item is ranked at the bottom

This presents a different proposition with learners having to decide which items they view as equal and what it takes for an item to be ranked on a level above or beneath another.

Second, is the repeated use of a ranking activity during a lesson or series of lessons.

Here we take learners back to their original rankings on a series of occasions to see whether further learning has caused them to change their minds.

Of course, whether it has or hasn’t, they must still justify their position.

Third, is the double-rank approach, where we first ask learners to rank a series of items in accordance with one set of criteria, before introducing a second set and asking learners to re-rank the items and to compare the similarities and differences between their two sets of rankings.

This can be particularly useful in helping learners to see familiar material in a different light.