|
- Without a rich understanding of concepts, individuals will be at a loss to make sense of what they read.
- Concept knowledge, along with vocabulary knowledge and world knowledge, is part of the background knowledge students need to construct meaning when they read.
- A concept is the category or class into which events, ideas, or objects are grouped. Examples and characteristics common to members that belong to the same class may further clarify it.
- An important requirement for learning concepts, and therefore teaching them, includes an understanding of the key characteristics, or attributes, that define the essential nature of the concept.
- Knowing and remembering a concept involves not only understanding of "always present" and "never present" characteristics, as well as naming of examples and non-examples, but it also requires explanation of how it relates to other concepts.
- A concept ladder can be used to help explain hierarchical concept relationships to students.
- A superordinate concept is an all-inclusive or overarching idea; a subordinate concept is a smaller idea that fits under a larger one; a coordinate concept is an idea that is of parallel stature and the same degree of specificity as another idea in a hierarchy.
- Labeling is the process of naming a concept. Without labels it would be very difficult to articulate concepts clearly.
- Full concept knowledge means that the word and the concept it represents are understood in some depth and that the person can use vocabulary sufficiently to convey concept meaning.
- Teachers can promote concept understanding by teaching associated vocabulary, using elaborative language in teaching, and making sure students can use a variety of sentence structures to explain and relate concepts.
- Visual depictions are a variety of graphic structures from simple timelines to complex matrices whose purpose is to organize information in a manner that makes the information easier to use. These can be teacher or student generated.
- The value of visual devices is to make concepts more concrete, depict relationships, serve as an aid to memory, and use content to enhance learning.
- Central structures focus on single, central ideas or concepts. All information visually flows or radiates outward from the central item.
- Directional structures place items in a sequence with one element not necessarily subordinate to another.
- Comparative structures indicate the relationships between at least two concepts that are compared or contrasted.
- The concept teaching routines which promote concept exploration and integration are important because a challenge in content teaching is moving beyond the teaching of isolated concepts to creating connections across ideas.
- The Concept Diagram allows the teacher to display information related to a key concept and to work with students to analyze and understand the concept.
- The Concept Anchoring Table allows the teacher to teach a new, difficult concept that is important for students to learn by drawing student attention to how the critical dimensions of the new concept are related to those of a concept familiar to them.
- The Concept Comparison Table allows the teacher to display information about two or more concepts or topics through an analysis of the characteristics shared by the concepts.
- Selecting critical concepts to teach in depth is a key to working with students with reading disabilities.
|
