Concept AttainmentChapter Six

Learning Concepts and Studying Thinking

Research, professional experience, and common sense lead us to the proposition that:

Learning to think about thinking is a major avenue to

Learning more and better – To becoming smarter.

Concept attainment was developed by Fred Lighthall and Bruce Joyce, building on studies of concept learning,to

* Enable students to learn concepts efficiently,* To study their thinking and become more capable at forming and attaining concepts.

A pre-organized data seto Whereas in the inductive model the teacher

presents a data set and the students form the concepts . Or, the teacher and students build the data set and the students form the concepts. Or, students learn to build the data set and form the concepts.

o However, when a teacher has a concept – a category whose members share one or more attributes -- and wishes to teach it, a data set is prepared made up of items that belong to the concept and items that do not share that attribute or one or more of the characteristics of a multiple-attribute category.

Pairs of Concepts

Positive Examplarso Contain the attributes

of the category.

Negative Examplarso Do not contain all the

attributes of the concept.

The pairs are presented to the students.

Their job is to attain the concept.

Then they study how to use it.

Over several sessions they study their strategy for arriving at concepts – and try to improve their processes.