Concept Attainment Strategy And Concept Attainment Strategies

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CHAPTER 1
THE PROBLEM AND ITS SETTING

Background of the Study Mathematics is considered as a difficult school subject by majority of the students around the world. In a survey conducted by Gallup in 2005 as cited by Fleming (2014) in her article Why Math is Difficult, 41% of girls and 31% of boys said that mathematics is the most difficult subject. Mathematics can be difficult especially if someone lacks conceptual understanding. Likewise in mathematics education, there are issues where student teachers in math and even some math teachers have difficulty in teaching mathematics because of unpracticed and forgotten concepts, and lack of conceptual understanding in mathematics. According to Kilpatrick, J. et al. (2001), conceptual understanding, …show more content…

It is a strategy coined by Jerome Bruner which uses structured inquiry process. Concept attainment strategy is an instructional strategy which focuses on decision-making and categorization processes which leads to the creation and understanding of a concept (Viveka, V. &Rai, E., 2013). In this strategy, the students will discover the characteristics of a group or category that has been provided by the teacher. To do so, students compare and contrast examples that contain the characteristics of the concept with examples that do not contain those characteristics. According to Basapur (2012), this is the best strategy among others because this strategy is designed to help students of all ages reinforce their understanding of concepts and practice hypothesis testing. He added that this strategy will help students to become more efficient at learning. In concept attainment strategy, students distinguish examples and non-examples of a given concept and hence, this will enhance their critical thinking skills and they would be able to explain why such that example is part of the given concept. Through these, students’ conceptual understanding will be enhanced because they are able to explain why those examples worked on the given

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