• Introduction
  • Distinction between strategy and procedure
    • Because it was developed through research, Hilda Taba's Inductive Strategy remains relatively stable.
    • Procedures are modified to suit style, circumstance, content and learning activities.
  • By applying a strategy broadly and making procedural modifications, there is "likely to be a marked improvement in the thinking skills of elementary school students as they study social topics and apply the knowledge they gain" (p. 64).
  • Three of the seven major strategies in Taba's Curriculum
    • Developing concepts
    • Attaining concepts
    • Interpreting, inferring, and generalizing
  • Minor strategies
    • Repeating students' responses
    • Rephrasing responses
    • Asking for explanations of predictions
    • Asking for explanations of high-level responses
  • Procedures cover translation of content into learnable tasks, discussion procedures and the formulation of hypotheses.

Major Strategies

• Developing Concepts
  • Aimed at establishing a firm basis for later development of well-understood generalizations
    • Concepts are building blocks for generalizations
  • Students identify a number of concrete items from their experience.
    • A field trip
    • A story they have read
    • (Units they have studied)
  • After a suitably large list is produced, students group the items that belong together and give reasons for doing so.
  • Students then label their groups.
  • Teacher questioning elicits identifying, grouping, and labeling responses.
    • Questioning
      • What did you see at the fire station?
        • Students provide items
        • Teacher places items on display, writes names of items on board, paper or transparency.
      • Do any of these items seem to belong together?
        • Students find similarities as a basis for grouping items.
        • Teacher marks with symbols or underlines in colored chalk, crayon, etc.
      • Why would you group these items together?
        • Students verbalize common characteristics of items grouped.
        • Teacher seeks clarification where necessary.
      • What would you call these groups you have formed?
        • Students verbalize a label (category) that is appropriate.
        • Teacher records the labels on paper, chalk board, etc.
      • Could some of these items belong to more than one group?
        • Students state different relationships
        • Teacher records or notes.
      • Can anyone say in one sentence something about all these groups?
        • Students offer suitable summary sentence.
        • Teacher reminds students to take into consideration all the groups.

Attaining Concepts

• Difference between building concepts and attaining concepts lies in degree of control.
  • Concept formation (Inductive)
    • Concept labels are the students' own.
    • They label a group in the most appropriate way
  • Attaining concepts (Deductive)
    • Students are first given a concept word to say and recognize.
    • Students are then asked to recognize when examples fit the concept.
• Attaining concepts can be used in a unit to clarify word meanings that are important for continuity of learning.
  • Using concept attainment
    • Make a chart on the board, on paper or on a transparency.
    • Ask students to suggest examples that fit the category named (Mammal).

Mammal	Not a Mammal
cat	frog
dog	snail
whale	bird

Developing Generalizations (Interpretation of Data)

• The end product of a process
  • Abstraction from a group of items following such processes as building concepts or concept attainment.
  • Generalizations are verbalized in the form of sentences rather than in single words as in concepts.
  • Higher level of thinking.
• Generalizations can take two forms
  • Interpretations or conclusions, which are statements of relationships from given data.
  • Inferences, which are statements of relationships that go beyond the given data.
• Examples of questions utilized in developing generalizations.
  • What do you notice about the data? Why did this or that happen?
  • What do you think this means?
  • Do you notice any connections within the records or across the data?
  • What makes you think this?
  • What can you conclude?

Applying Generalizations (Application of Principles)

• Examples of qestions utilized in applying principles.
  • What if?
  • Why do you think this or that would happen?
  • Based on the data, would these conditions be logical?

Taba, H., Durkin, M. C., Fraenkel, J. R., & NcNaughton, A. H. (1971). A teacher's handbook to elementary social studies: An inductive approach (2nd ed.). Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.