Using concept formation strategies to improve student thinking and learning by creating and analyzing databases

1. Roberta Niche, McKinney ISD

2. How Students Learn
How We Should Teach
How Technology Can Assist
Database
Concepts
Bunching
Facts
Seeking
Patterns
Making
Connections
Thinking Skills Problem Solving Concept Formation

3. Why is this stuff
important?

4. “For much of the twentieth century, teachers
sought to teach discreet facts. Now it is
essential to seek ways of teaching children
how to think, how to process information
from many points of view, and how to solve
problems. The sheer volume of information
and the wide accessibility to the Internet
make mere knowledge acquisition of
secondary value.”
Dr. Terry Armstrong, Idaho Virtual Campus

5. How Students Learn
Some things we know about

6. •The brain is wired to to look for patterns
and connections
•Learning centered around broad
concepts and “big questions” is more
likely to be effective than learning based
on recall of facts
•Constructivism: Learners construct their
own knowledge by plugging new
information into their existing frame of
reference.

7. “We know from brain research that students
need to see patterns and connections. And if
they have no way to make sense of this
massive amount of information that's coming
at them, they tend to get confused. It just
becomes traipsing over trivia.”
Lynn Erickson, Curriculum consultant and author of Concept-
Based Curriculum and Instruction: Teaching Beyond the FactsLynn Erickson

8. •Memorize the names of the Pharaohs
of ancient Egypt (in order).
Better:
•Why do great civilizations like Ancient
Egypt fail?

9. of how the brain strives to
find connections between
facts and how it tries to
plug those facts into
concepts…….

10. Gorilla Butterfly Goldfish
Horse Pig Coral Snake
Octopus Sheep Cobra
Cow Giraffe Salmon
Owl Zebra Monkey
Earthworm Robin House Fly
Read these animals names. You have one
minute to memorize as many as possible.

11. Write down the names
of as many animals as
you can remember.

12. Gorilla Butterfly Goldfish
Horse Pig Coral Snake
Octopus Sheep Cobra
Cow Giraffe Salmon
Owl Zebra Monkey
Earthworm Robin House Fly

13. Zoo Fly Crawl Farm Swim
Gorilla Owl Coral Snake Horse Goldfish
Giraffe Butterfly Cobra Cow Salmon
Zebra Robin Earthworm Pig Octopus
Monkey House Fly Sheep
What if you’d put animals into
groups before you tried to
memorize them?

14. Students who have not been
taught how to think often read
text from start to end, never
making connections or
“chunking” (classifying)
information. When they get to
the end, they remember little
and understand less.

15. “Our brains are constantly seeking patterns
and connections. By bunching facts into
categories or organizing them around
concepts, the brain can make its own sense
out of information and begin to understand
it. Therefore, to help students see
connections and make sense of the
curriculum, it should be organized around
concepts and principles.”
http://www.ascd.org/pdi/demo/diffinstr/differentiated2.html

16. For Example
Concepts in geography would include
•Location
•Place
•Human/environment interaction
•Movement
•Regions

17. Old Way:
Write a report about Arizona.
Include the state bird, the state
song, and the state flag. Tell when
it was founded and list five
important facts in its history. List its
main natural resources, agricultural
products, and manufacturing.

18. Better Way:
Investigate the Southwest Region of
the United States.Work with your
team to decide where in this region
your “family” should relocate. You
will want to consider crime rates,
quality of schools, cost of living,
amount of pollution, availability of
quality health care, entertainment…,

19. •Collaborative
•HOTS
•Authentic in purpose
•Teaches a thinking process, a way
of looking at and evaluating
information. Students can use this
same process in other contexts to
learn other information.

20. “Jerome Bruner recognizes the futility of
knowing everything but insists that we
should all learn a rich conceptual
framework. While it may be impossible to
know the dates attendant to all of the
world's great revolutions, we should know
the underlying ideas that foment such
revolutions. Bruner emphasizes concept
attainment to allow students to first see
the big picture.”
Dr. Terry Armstrong: http://ivc.uidaho.edu/mod/models/bruner/

21. Learners:
•Actively construct their knowledge.
•Don’t simply absorb ideas spoken at them
by teachers, or internalize them by rote drill
and practice
•Create new knowledge by assimilating new
information with pre-existing ideas, and
modifying their understanding when they get
new new data.

22. Active Engagement
Not Just Passive Reception

23. Let’s see these ideas in action!
Concept Formation Teaching
Strategies:
•The Animals Project
•The Presidents Project

24. Basic Concept Formation Strategy
•What did you see? What did you hear?
What comes to mind… (Teacher lists items
on the chalkboard.)
•What things belong together? (Students
begin to group items by identifying common
properties.)
•What would you call these groups?
(Students give labels or names to grouped
items. This is categorizing.)

25. Meta-cognitive Objective
(Thinking about their thinking)
Students will reflect upon their thinking
processes when using this skill and
examine its effectiveness.

26. Look at your white
covered handout, page titled
“Thinking About Animals”

27. Look at your white
covered handout, page titled
“Thinking About Presidents”

28. Database:
A great tool for students to
use to make sense of this
information…….

29. What is a database?
• Program to organize and store data
-example: contact information
• Can:
• find patterns in data
• view data various ways
• filter and sort data
• explore and analyze problems
Microsoft Works, Excel, Access

31. Allow students to:
• Organize data
• Categorize
• See relationships between categories
• Explore problems
• Formulate hypotheses
• Compare and contrast
• Make inferences

32. Listing
Grouping
Labeling
Categorizing
Sorting
Sifting
Classifying
Graphing
Compare/Contrast
Alike and Different
Cause/Effect

33. Smokers: The Practice Database
Let’s play with a Database!
Open the practice database from
the session web page

34. Upper grade project: gold handout
Primary grade project: pink handout
Everyone will:
-Do some research on the Internet
-Open his/her template
-Enter information in the database
-Ask and answer questions
-Groups Report Out

35. Questions you asked and answered
Graphs made (if had time)
Questions for me