'Classify' helps students achieve two common learning goals. First, it helps students understand how a discipline or subject's information is organised, but it does so in a way that requires students to infer the principles, thus learning the system at a deeper level than if they were simply 'told' the system. Second, it helps students learn to identify component parts and to determine how the parts relate to the whole, which are essential steps in analysis.

Teachers gather a collection of items (such as specimens, images, or slips of paper with information written upon them) that represent subcategories in a classification system and provide a set to each group of students. Students examine, discuss, and sort the contents into categories based on shared features as they attempt to deduce the subject's classification system. A reporter from each group then explains the group's classification system and the rules used to guide their organisation to the whole class. The instructor uses the students' ideas and principles as the basis for presenting and discussing the topic's established classification system.