Concept Attainment
Description
What Is It?
The Concept Attainment strategy provides students with an opportunity to describe, identify, and construct a new concept through a teacher-led interactive structure. This elicits student language for pre-assessment purposes.
Why Use It?
The Concept Attainment strategy is used to provide students contrasting examples to describe, identify, and conclude an understanding.
It can be utilized to note and determine student language use as a pre-assessment to inform planning for instruction.
Instructional Steps:
1) The students analyze examples and non-examples, one at a time, as they turn and talk about what they observe with a partner using sentence stems.
2) Students generate an understanding of the concept as they discover the similarities of one group and contrast that group’s attributes with the other group’s.
3) Students conclude what concepts or big ideas they will be learning about through the unit of study.
Quick Tips
Depending on the concept being developed, one to four visuals or realia per category may be used for analysis/comparison.
Did you know?
This strategy can work for all grade levels.
For additional guidance implementing this strategy, please reach out to the Elementary MET.