What is Concept Formation?

Concept formation provides students with an opportunity to explore ideas by making connections
and seeing relationships between items of information. This method can help students develop and
refine their ability to recall and discriminate among key ideas, to see commonalities and identify
relationships, to formulate concepts and generalizations, to explain how they have organized data,
and to present evidence to support their organization of the data involved.

What is its purpose?

In this instructional method, students are provided with data about a particular concept. These data
may be generated by the teacher or by the students themselves. Students are encouraged to classify
or group the information and to give descriptive labels to their groupings. By linking the examples
to the labels and by explaining their reasoning, the students form their own understanding of the
concept.

Concept formation lessons can be highly motivational because students are provided with an
opportunity to participate actively in their own learning. In addition, the thinking process involved
helps them create new and expanded meaning of the world around them as they organize and
manipulate information from other lessons and contexts in new ways.

How do I do it?

Concept formation involves the recognition that some objects or events belong together while
others do not. Students are provided with data about a particular concept and are encouraged to
classify or group the data. Once the objects have been grouped according to a particular
categorization scheme, the grouping is given a label. This type of strategy could be used when
identifying different terminology of computer software applications. Teachers may ask students to
identify and list a number of items found in a setting, group the items that belong together using
common characteristics, label the groupings, and rearrange and relabel items into subgroups, if
students feel that is possible. The teacher is the initiator of the activity and guides students as they
move cooperatively through the task.

Formation of Concepts: 4 Main Steps

• Observation
• Generalisation
• Discrimination or Differentiation
• Abstraction.
Step # 1. Observation:
The first stage in the formation of concepts is the observation of an event, object or an experience.
This can also be called the stage of becoming aware. This can be either direct or indirect. The child
can directly see a dog and become aware of it.

On the other hand, he also hears stories about devils and giants from his parents and grandparents;
here the awareness is indirect. Thus, all of us have some knowledge or awareness of primitive
people (or at least we believe we have) even though most of us have not seen them. Generally
repeated experiences provide the basis for the development of concepts.

Step # 2. Generalisation:
Repeated experiences or observations of different objects result in a tendency to form a general
idea. Thus, a child first sees one dog, then another dog, then a third and so on and begins to form
the general idea of a dog. This is called the process of generalisation. The process of generalisation
explains how the child acquires many concepts like the concepts of gender, shape, number, etc.

Step # 3. Discrimination or Differentiation:

At the same time dogs and cows are different from each other and big dogs are different from small
dogs, and bulls are different from cows. It is this type of sequential operation of generalisation and
differentiation in interaction that leads to the formation of concepts.

Step # 4. Abstraction:
From the description of the above processes the operation of abstraction becomes evident. The
child has seen dogs and he happens to see a cow on a different occasion. He does not observe them
at the same time but inwardly he compares his experiences on the two occasions.

The perceptions and the experiences are now inwardly analysed and re-experienced in the absence
of the objects. This results in an appreciation of similarities and differences. This process by which
the experience is analysed in the absence of actual situations is known as abstraction. It is
abstraction which actually transforms comparable and contrasting experiences into concepts.

This ability to respond to concrete situations in the absence of the actual situations is known as
abstract thinking ability. It can be seen that as the child grows older, the process of abstraction
plays an increasingly important role in the development of concepts. It is this process of abstraction
which helps us to form ideas of the future and far off objects.
The growth of science, in particular, and knowledge, in general and, perhaps, the growth of culture
and civilisation, have all been possible because of our ability to form abstract concepts. Concepts
like force, energy, mind, truth are all examples of abstract concepts. Literary creations,
masterpieces in art and other fields, are all embodiments of abstract concepts.

The ability to form abstract concepts is related to the intellectual ability of an individual and the
richness of his experience. To a large extent performance in intelligence tests also reflects the
ability to form abstract concepts. The development of concepts proceeds from general and
undifferentiated concepts to differentiated concepts.

For example, when a child looks at an object for the first time, he forms a vague and general idea
of the object as a whole. This is why, a child’s concepts are not very clear. Gradually the details
of the concepts become clear. One of the authors remembers that once upon a time his little niece
referred to a pig as a big rat.

It was only subsequently that the little girl developed both the concepts and was able to
differentiate a pig from a rat. The formation of clear concepts, therefore, involves the three
processes – generalisation, differentiation and abstraction.

The greater, the wider and the richer an individual’s experience with different objects and stimuli
the better is the process of formation of concepts. The reader will, no doubt, understand the
importance of the formation of clear concepts for proper adjustment and the importance of a rich
and varied environment for enhancing the development of concepts in children.