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Concept Attainment |
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Home The Definition What is learning? "Learning theories are attempts to systematize and organize the observation and principles for educators to enhance the teaching strategies" (Chen, 2000). "To instruct someone... is not a matter of getting him to commit results to mind. Rather, it is to teach him to participate in the process that makes possible the establishment of knowledge. We teach a subject not to produce little living libraries on that subject, but rather to get a student to think mathematically for himself, to consider matters as an historian does, to take part in the process of knowledge-getting. Knowing is a process not a product" (Bruner, 1966: 72) Concept attainment is based on the works of of Jerome Bruner . He argued that concept attainment is "the search for and listing of attributes that can be used to distinguish exemplars from nonexemplars of various categories" (Bruner, Goodnow, & Austin, 1967, p. 233). According to Joyce and Weil (2000), "Concept attainment requires a student to figure out about the attributes of a category that is already formed in another person's mind by comparing and contrasting examples that contain the characteristics of the concept with exemplars that do not contain those attributes" (pp 146-147). Concept attainment is then an indirect instructional strategy. Structured inquiry drives the strategy. Learners look at groups or categories comparing and contrasting the groups that contain the attributes with groups that do not contain the concept.
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