Concept Attainment

Chapter 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 set
o 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 Examplars Negative Examplars

o Contain the o Do not contain all
attributes of the the attributes of
category. 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.