Attaining the Concept

Let’s play a game. I am going to introduce names of animals in two categories.

Category 1	Category 2
Dog	Lion

Now you got the first set of animals. Let me introduce second and the third one.

Category 1	Category 2
Dog	Lion
Cow	Elephant
Cat	bear

Can you guess a pattern in Category 1 and 2? If you can, hold on, if you can’t its okay. Now, I am going to ask you some questions. Tell me under which category ‘goat’ comes.

Yes you are right - Category 1.

Category 1	Category 2
Dog	Lion
Cow	Elephant
Cat	bear
Goat

Now next one - ‘tiger’?

Yes! Category 2

Category 1	Category 2
Dog	Lion
Cow	Elephant
Cat	bear
Goat	Tiger

Now tell me where does,

• Horse comes?
• Deer?
• Giraffe
• Hen

Do this one by one.

Category 1	Category 2
Dog	Lion
Cow	Elephant
Cat	bear
Goat	Tiger
Horse	Deer
Hen	Giraffe

Now, are you able to identify the category? Not yet, don’t answer. Let’s go on further. Can you give me an example for category-1? An example for category-2? Elicit at least three sets of examples.

Category 1	Category 2
Dog	Lion
Cow	Elephant
Cat	Bear
Goat	Tiger
Horse	Deer
Hen	Giraffe
Duck	Cheetah
Rabbit	Snake
Buffalo	Monkey

Can you now tell me what the category means?

Yes! Category 1 is ‘Domestic animals’ and Category 2 is ‘Wild animals’.

In the game, you must have got your ‘aha’ moment earlier or later, but it was to your thinking that helped you get there. Even if you didn’t get it and got the answer externally you were able to take in the concept inside so easily and naturally.

This technique called ‘Concept Attainment Model’ was developed by Jerome Bruner, a pioneer in Constructivist Pedagogy.

Information processing and pattern recognition, it seems, one of the fundamentals of human cognitive ability. CAM builds on that. Bruner uses an ‘Yes/No’ model instead of two categories model I used to introduce one concept by giving an example against a non-example.

I used it to introduce ‘Punctuation’ and ‘Capitalisation’ by presenting a positive example of a correct sentence against the negative example of a wrong sentence. Then we discussed on deducing what made each sentence right or wrong, thus developing a list of grammar rules for writing a correct sentence.