Analogy practice starting point
Teams discover word pair relationships

Analogy practice questions on tests are boring and impractical. A collaborative analogy practice activity, however, is interactive, fun for students, and gives useful course vocabulary review.

Instead of teaching students a list of word relationships commonly found on standardized tests, use analogies word problems that give them an opportunity to discover those relationships.

The reason most students are bewildered by analogy word problems is that they don't have an adequate understanding of the meanings of the words.

You can address this problem by creating analogy practice items that use your course vocabulary. That way you can be sure students have at least been exposed to the words in the analogies.

The analogies practice activity below will provide an example you can follow with other content.

Goal of this analogy practice activity

The object of this analogy practice activity is for students to discover at least six ways two words may be related. The list of relationships they discover can be applied to solving analogy problems.

We hope the activity also shows students the importance of knowing more than just a test-prep definition of words.

Materials you will need

You need a list of word pairs that that illustrate common analogy types. The more examples you have, the better.

Create your list from the topics you study in your course. Here are some examples:

• fiction : novel :: category : example
• limerick : poem :: example: category
• sentence : paragraph :: part : whole
• nonfiction : biography :: category : example
• PowerPoint : speech :: object : use
• reasoning : persuasion :: cause : effect
• perspective : viewpoint :: novel : book-length fiction
• conclusion : ending :: introduction : beginning
• topic : subject :: nonfiction : factual
• fiction : nonfiction = oral : written

In addition to a generous sprinkling of word pairs whose relationship is obvious, include word pairs whose relationship is debatable or not easily described in one or two words.

For example, in the word pair blog and editorial students might have various interpretations, such as:

• Blogs appear in digital media, editorials appear in print media, thus they should be considered opposites.
• Both blogs and editorials are their authors' opinions, thus they should be considered synonyms.
• A blog is group of opinions on a variety of subjects over a period of time, but an editorial is a single opinion on one subject on a given day, so the relationship is many to one.

Word pairs that are open to interpretation encourage discussion about the meanings of each word. Ambiguity leads to higher-level learning as students discuss the definitions of terms and look for the most logical relationships between vocabulary words.

Directions for the student teams

Have students work in small groups to identify the relationship(s) between the words of each pair.

Some relationships may be more obvious than others, but there are no right or wrong answers for the word pairs. When students don't agree on a relationship, they should list all the relationships they observe.

(If you have some students who are timid about group work, you might begin the activity by having all students write informally about a relationship they perceive in each of two or three word pairs. Such informal writing shows students that they have something to share with the group.)

As soon as students have completed a few of the word pairs, they can begin to sort them according to the relationship they observe. Their goal is to find at least a half dozen ways a pair of words may be related.

You may wish to wrap up the activity with a time for the entire class to share the kinds of relationship possibilities they uncovered. In this way, students may identify additional relationships their group did not identify. They may also discover some better language to describe relationships they did observe.

Continue analogy practice

The next step in teaching students to solve analogies is by giving them open-ended word problems. That, too, is an activity you can do in groups using content you wish students to review.