Concept Formation

Concept Formation is an excellent tool as it involves comparative thinking, symbolic representations and logical reasoning. It lets the user understand how concepts are classified in regular life and how there are different rationales for different classifications. A concept is defined by the critical characteristics shared among all examples of it. Students discuss what makes these examples unique or important for themselves in relation to other things. They review sets of examples, and then make deductions about related concepts on their own through these studies without any help from others or resources outside themselves. It also highlights that categorising objects, ideas and events, is a way for people and students to make sense out of the world which is crucial in our current dynamic societies. The implementation process of the tool involves the following steps: enumerating and listing (mental operation: differentiation), grouping and exploring relationships (identifying and abstracting) and labelling and categorising (determining the order). It can be performed on three different levels depending on the mental functions the teacher wants to activate, or the students are able to perform and the nature of concepts chosen.