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Source: Adapted from Murphy, P. K., Wilkinson, I. A. G., Soter, A. O., Hennessey, M. N., & Alexander, J. F. (2009). Examining the effects of classroom discussion on students’ comprehension of text: A meta-analysis. Journal of Educational Psychology, 101(3), 740–764.
Socratic Seminar Rubric
Student Self-Assessment of Discussion
The goals for this discussion were:
1.
2.
3.
How well did I achieve these goals?
The most rewarding thing about this discussion was:
The most challenging thing about this discussion was:
The next time I am part of a similar discussion, I will make the following changes.
Chapter 2
Concept Attainment
Zero and absolute zero—these are complicated concepts to master for young learners and old learners alike. To help them, effective teachers continually seek ways to make connections among relevant concepts. Grouping, organizing, categorizing, sense making—in essence, developing concepts for understanding the world—are critical aspects of learning for all students, and effective teachers understand the importance of concept building for any subject and in any context.
A concept can be defined as “a set of specific objects, symbols, or events that are grouped together or categorized on the basis of shared characteristics, called attributes” (Holt & Kysilka, 2006, p. 309), so one can think of concepts as the building blocks of education. An effective teacher aims virtually everything he or she does at developing student understanding of a concept and then applying and building on those concepts. In that vein, this chapter explores concept attainment as an instructional method to help students develop skills for inductive and deductive thinking while learning subject matter in a constructive and meaningful way.
What Research Says About Concept Attainment
The research interest on concept attainment started in the 1980s. Robert Tennyson and Martin Cocchiarella (1986) find that concept attainment not only helps students learn subject content but also helps them acquire procedural knowledge and metacognitive skills. Specifically, they summarize the following four methods of research-based teaching concepts.
1. Definition: Provide or develop a rule or generality that verbally states the structure of the critical attributes. (Example: Provide the best examples of igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic rock, and provide direct definitions.)
2. Expository instances: Present and explain how to systematically classify examples and non-examples according to variable attributes, thereby making statements to elaborate on the concept. (Example: Explicitly direct students to compare and contrast the examples of igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic rock.)
3. Interrogatory instances: Use questioning to encourage a compare and contrast approach, direct students to identify examples and non-examples, and have them make inferences about the concept by themselves. (Example: Prompt students to categorize the rocks into igneous, sedimentary, or metamorphic groupings based on their knowledge of best examples.)
4. Attribute elaboration: Encourage analysis of the critical attributes in expository instances and feedback on the critical attributes in interrogatory instances. (Example: Focus students’ attention in a given example, say metamorphic rock, on its specific and unique characteristics, such as texture.)
Similarly, Ok-Choon Park (1984) examines the effectiveness of two concept-teaching strategies.
1. Classical-attribute-identification strategy: Facilitate the identification process of critical attributes of a concept. (Example: Use an analytically organized list of critical attributes of igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic rock.)
2. Example-comparison strategy: Facilitate the formation and elaboration process of a prototype concept. (Example: Guide students to compare and contrast examples of igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic rock.)
Park’s (1984) findings indicate that students who use the classical-attribute-identification strategy have more on-task engagement time and better learning performance during instruction than those using the example-comparison strategy, but the former students require more time to complete the instructional unit. The findings also show that students using the example-comparison strategy have better learning performance after instruction and exhibit better prototype memory formation, which results in a higher degree of retention. Thus, Park (1984) suggests that incorporating both strategies into concept instruction might lead to optimal student learning results. We echo this recommendation.
Studies also find that concept attainment is effective in improving meaningful acquisition of concepts. For instance, a 2013 study by Amit Kumar and Madhu Mathur notes that students instructed with concept attainment outperform those who do not use a formal concept approach (by a mean score of 85.60 versus 65.57) in acquisition of physics concepts. Another study (Fox & Sullivan, 2007) finds that students who practice classification of examples and non-examples are better at identifying new instances of the abstract concepts than students who do not.
There are still other studies that focus on the impact of incorrect examples on student concept learning. For instance, Tim Heemsoth and Aiso Heinze (2014) find that high-achieving sixth-grade students could benefit from incorrect examples when learning the concept of fractions; however, students with low prior achievement learned more from correct examples. In many cases, it is easy to explain why a correct answer is correct, while explaining why an answer is incorrect
