Objectives and Assignments
Concept Attainment
Introduction:
During the 1960's there was a "revolution" in teaching models and presentation of lessons. The movement is often referred to as "The Structure of the Disciplines" movement. Momentum for the movement increased after "Sputnik". The public, content academics, psychologists and educators questioned whether we teaching our students the right information in enough depth.
An important meeting occurred in the late 1950's at Woods Hole, Massachusetts which brought all of the constinuences mentioned above together. The Process of Education is a small book written by Jerome Bruner, but documenting the essence of the discussions in the meetings held at Wood's Hole.
The movement has since been characterized as "The Structure of the Disciplines" movement. It was thought that there are key concepts for each discipline (e.g. biology, anthropology, physics, geometry, history, chemistry, sociology etc.). The key to in-depth learning is to identify these key concepts and their relationships to one another (their structure) and to design lessons which teach these concepts.
It was thought that students need to have direct experience with the methods and procedures of investigation that experts use in different fields of study. Thus, students might "become" anthropologists and inquire about a set of artifacts. The purpose of this type of activity would be to not only develop the intellectual skills of the area of study but also to gain an understanding of the key concepts of the area of study. It was thought that these outcomes would allow students to organize information, have a process of storing and remembering information and a have a mechanism for applying new information and generalizing information to new situations. Students could encounter concepts in an authentic, intellectual way, in a developmentally appropriate manner. The "spiralling curriculum" was introduced: Concepts can be taught at increasing more complex levels, visited and revisited throughout the educational process.
The concept attainment model arose out of the need to encourage and motivate students to learn concents; and to then ascertain whether students had indeed learned the key concepts.
Objectives:
Participants will:
- identify the different phases of the concept attainment model
- identify key concepts from their field(s) of study
- develop positive and negative
exemplars for a concept
- a concrete, more "simple" concept
- a complex, more abstract concept
- choose developmentally appropriate concepts (for the learners)
- list the essential attributes and non-essential attributes for the concepts
- design activities to have students practice metacognition, to become aware of which mental activities they used to narrow their choices for attributes and concept names.
- compare concept attainment and inductive reasoning
- decide where the application of the strategy occurs along a continuum between teacher led and student led.
Assignments:
Readings: Joyce and Weill: Concept Attainment Model. Be
sure to use the Erickson book as a resource and
idea generator. Homework: Concept Attainment is one of the required models
for which you need to design plans. 1. The first plan should be a more concrete
concept that will be fairly accessible for most of
the learners. The first lesson will give both you
and the students experience with the model. You
will need to hand in the two planning sheets which
list the specific examples and attributes as well
as the sytategy template with the questions you
will ask students. 2. You will need to devise a second plan that is
concept attainment however the concept is more
challenging to attain (This is a different concept
than number 1 above.) It will be a greater
challenge for you to devise the positive and
negative exemplars and perhaps challenging to
determine what are the essential attributes.
Turn in the planning sheets nd the strategy
template. Activity 1 We will complete this activity in class. It is
optional to complete with your students. It may be
helpful for them in indentifying attributes, to see
how the no examples are often as helpful as the yes
examples. The link will take you to a word document
with the lesson and the templates for the figures
and the rules. Activity 2 Word templates that you may use with your
students are under "strategy
template". When planning your lessons out, you should fill
out the student worksheets to provide an idea of
what students will be doing. Activity 3 Boxes of items: Comparing Inductivie Reasoning
and Concept Attainment Look at the section at the left compares models
for a write up of this model. Activity 4 You will be using the concept attainment model
to explore webquests (project based learning) and
to make a rubric for project based learning.
EdTe 226
October, 2001