Concept+Formation+&+Attainment

Concept Formation **What is Concept Formation ? **  Concept formation provides students with an opportunity to explore ideas by making connections and seeing relationships between items of information. This method can help students develop and refine their ability to recall and discriminate among key ideas, to see commonalities and identify relationships, to formulate concepts and generalizations, to explain how they have organized data, and to present evidence to support their organization of the data involved.

**What is its purpose?** In this instructional method, students are provided with data about a particular concept. These data may be generated by the teacher or by the students themselves. Students are encouraged to classify or group the information and to give descriptive labels to their groupings. By linking the examples to the labels and by explaining their reasoning, the students form their own understanding of the concept.

Concept formation lessons can be highly motivational because students are provided with an opportunity to participate actively in their own learning. In addition, the thinking process involved helps them create new and expanded meaning of the world around them as they organize and manipulate information from other lessons and contexts in new ways.

**How do I do it? **  Concept formation involves the recognition that some objects or events belong together while others do not. Students are provided with data about a particular concept and are encouraged to classify or group the data. Once the objects have been grouped according to a particular categorization scheme, the grouping is given a label. This type of strategy could be used when identifying different terminology of computer software applications. Teachers may ask students to identify and list a number of items found in a setting, group the items that belong together using common characteristics, label the groupings, and rearrange and relabel items into subgroups, if students feel that is possible. The teacher is the initiator of the activity and guides students as they move cooperatively through the task.

(from http://olc.spsd.sk.ca/de/pd/instr/strats/formation/index.html )

**Overview of Concepts in Social Studies Curricula**
Piaget || The objectives of social studies education as outlined by the Social Studies Task Force, the Reference Committee, and Core Curriculum emphasize skills and attitudes that will enable students to understand information; research and write about issues in creative, meaningful ways; and debate and evaluate issues. Recall of factual information is required to the extent that it supports these objectives.
 * Children will not truly understand a concept until they have had an opportunity to re-invent it for themselves.

Evaluation must also reflect these objectives by testing students for more than the recall of information. Evaluation must determine whether students are achieving the skills/abilities and attitudinal objectives as well as the informational objectives of the course. It is important that in the evaluation process students demonstrate they have learned to generate and apply knowledge in meaningful ways A concept is a category that groups together objects or ideas with certain similarities. Each category is defined by criteria which determine what can and cannot be accepted into the category.
 * ||  ||   || ** The Twenty Core Concepts ** ||

Central to the K-12 social studies framework is a set of twenty major concepts drawn from the social science disciplines. These concepts act as organizers for the required knowledge, skills, and values learnings.

The twenty concepts are:

Causality Change Conflict Culture || Decision making Distribution Diversity Environment Identity || Institution Interaction Interdependence Needs Location || Power Resources Technology Time Values ||
 * Beliefs

The goals of both the Reference Committee and Core Curriculum (with its emphasis on the Common Essential Learnings) include the teaching of higher order thinking as well as teaching social studies and history information. Instructional methods that promote both types of learning at the same time must be used. Concept attainment is one such method. People organize information into meaningful patterns using concepts. Objects or ideas which have in common certain characteristics or critical attributes can be placed in the same category and given a label. These labelled categories are concepts.
 * ||  ||   || ** Concept Attainment ** ||

A concept can range from a category of things as concrete as chairs to a category of relationships as abstract as power. By learning to understand and use concepts, students can use the critical attributes of a concept as criteria to categorize data so that inferences may be drawn from them. This process enables the student to simplify complex information by organizing (classifying) the categories or concepts into meaningful patterns. This is an important step towards independent learning and critical and creative thinking.
 * ||  ||   || ** Concept Application ** ||






 * **Steps:** ||
 * **1.** Identify a concept that you plan to teach (e.g. civic responsibility). ||
 * **2.** Create 4 examples of the concept using a plus sign (+) or a smiley face to indicate that it is an example of the concept. ||
 * **3.** Create 3 non-examples of the concept using a negative sign (-) or a frowning face to indicate that it is a non-example. ||
 * **4.** Present examples and non-examples one at a time in alternating progression. ||
 * **5.** Have the students guess what the concept is as each example or non-example is presented. ||
 * **6.** Do not reveal the concept until all examples and non-examples have been presented. ||
 * **7.** Use the positive examples to flesh out the qualities or definition of the concept. ||

||
 * **Example of Concept Formation Acitivity:**
 * What is the Concept? ** ||
 * (+) obeying the law ||
 * (-) free speech ||
 * (+) paying taxes ||
 * (-) remain silent ||
 * (+) military service ||
 * (-) obtain a driver's license ||
 * (+) serving on a jury ||
 * The concept is CIVIC RESPONSIBILITY.
 * The concept is CIVIC RESPONSIBILITY.

=Mark used this handout in his social studies methods course as an undergrad - it's still a helpful resource to try out =