|
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.
Teacher
Resources
|
