Concept Development and Concept Attainment Models

Since in my last blog I described how I will utilize some of the Cooperative Learning strategies, I will focus this entry on the Concept Development and Concept Attainment Models.  A colleague had introduced me to the Concept Development model, but it was not until I read the chapter that I truly understood the steps involved.  For the next school year, I would like to incorporate this model when introducing our Energy Unit.  I would allow the students to list as many items that they can think of that are associated with energy.  Then, the students would find a way to logically group the items and label each group.  The last step would be to have the students reconsider their previous thinking and labels that they created.  Students will also justify their groups and any regroupings that they made.

Another way to intrude our Energy Unit would be to use the Concept Attainment Model.  I would like to model the classroom scenario that was in the chapter for introducing energy as the "capacity of a physical system to perform work."  I would have to identify the attributes of energy that I want students to understand like 1) a force that can be converted, but not destroyed and 2) a force that can change from one form to another.  I would then have to select some examples and non-examples of energy that I would share with the class.  Some of the examples would be a bicycle, a toaster, a solar panel, etc.  Some of the non-examples would include a brick, a desk, an old tire, etc.  I would then walk my students through some examples and non-examples while having students list the common attributes.  The students would finally hypothesize what the concept is after looking at all of the common attributes of the examples.

I think both ways that I have described here would be great for introducing the Energy Unit in my 6th grade classroom!