Graphic Organizers provide a great way to help you sort out your ideas and think more critically about the information that you have found in your research. Organizers can help you to:

Graphic Organizer

  • Sort and classify your ideas
  • Develop a sequence
  • Prioritize
  • Make comparisons
  • Examine cause and effect
  • See relationships
  • See different perspectives
  • Evaluate various ideas
  • Develop your own point of view
  • Develop a project outline

You can use the organizers on this website, draw your own to meet your particular needs, or use graphic organizing software like SMART Ideas to build organizers and create outlines.

Graphic Organizers

Identifying Similarities & Differences

  • Helps you to compare things, topics, ideas, points of view
  • Helps you to decide on criteria for comparison
  • Assists in making decisions based on your comparison criteria

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Cause & Consequence

  • Helps to organize how and why things happen and their consequences
  • Gives key phrases to help you recognize cause and consequence statements in the text
  • Helps you to decide what you think about the event

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Making Judgements: Pros & Cons

  • Helps you to make a decision about a topic.
  • Organizes evidence that supports or opposes your question or statement.
  • Invites you to make your own decision, based on good, solid evidence.

A researcher’s Example Pros & Cons Organizer.

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Looking at Issues From All Angles

  • Some topics are particularly controversial. Being a good researcher means considering different perspectives and then developing your own, supported ideas about the topic.
  • Use this organizer to help you see issues from different perspectives.

A researcher’s Example Issues & Angles Organizer.

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Sample Organizers

Making Judgements: Pros & Cons

See how this organizer was used to help answer the question, “Should plastic water bottles be banned?”

Sample Sheet of Pros and Cons

Looking at Issues From All Angles

See how this organizer was used to help see different points of view about cell phones in schools.

Issues and Angles Sample sheet

Find even more graphic templates by checking out the ControlAltAchieve website.