What Is Conceptual Learning?

Concept learning is to learn to group things with common attributes together under a name, and exclude things that do not have such attributes. The main factors affecting concept learning are: the defining characteristics of the concept; the prototype; the way of teaching the concept; the connection between the concepts; the student's age, gender, intelligence, motivation, emotion, experience, nationality, language ability, values, and use of learning strategies Individual differences in their own factors.

Chinese name: Concept learning

Applied discipline: psychology

Definition of concept learning

Concept learning is to learn to group things with common attributes together under a name, and exclude things that do not have such attributes. ^[1]

Conditions for conceptual learning

Conceptual learning provides conceptual examples

Examples are typical examples that can represent concepts. Providing appropriate examples helps learners grasp the main characteristics of concepts. Paradigms can have concept prototypes to tell learners what the concept is, or counterexamples to let learners understand what the concept is not. In general, the best examples are archetypes where defining features are obvious or the learner is most familiar with. Counterexamples are important when a concept is easily confused with other concepts.

There are two ways to provide examples: one is the case-rule; the other is the case-rule.

Concept learning using connections between concepts

There is a connection between concepts. Using the learner's existing concepts to form a "concept map" and putting new concepts in it, in such a "map", the lower-level relationship between the concept and the concept is clearly revealed, and the concept is given With more meanings, it helps learners to master new concepts through known concepts.

Concept learning eliminates wrong concepts

It is easy for learners to form unscientific misconceptions from daily life experience, and once such unscientific misconceptions are formed, it is difficult to eliminate or change them. For this kind of problem, we can use the defining features of the concept to directly point out the mistakes of the learners.

Concept learning using concepts in practice

Every time a learner uses a concept or encounters the same concept in a new rich context, that is, each time the concept is concreted, the concept is further enriched and deepened, and the learner s understanding of the essentials is more complete and deeper, especially It is even more so with vague teaching. The application of concepts to reality is the process of materializing such concepts. ^[1]

Conceptual learning

The process of concept learning includes two steps: the acquisition of concepts and the application of concepts.

First, there are two forms of acquiring concepts, namely the formation of concepts and the assimilation of concepts.

1. The formation of a concept refers to starting from a large number of specific examples and extracting the common essential attributes of a class of things through inductive methods to form a concept.

2. Assimilation of concepts refers to the way in which new concepts are incorporated into the original relevant concepts in the cognitive structure of the student, so that the student acquires the concept.

Second, the use of concepts means that after the concepts are obtained, they can play a role in cognitive activities and have an effect on cognitive activities. It is generally reflected at the two levels of perception and thinking. Applying concepts at the perceptual level refers to applying the concepts that have been acquired to help identify and classify specific similar things. Applying concepts at the level of thinking refers to using concepts to judge, reason, or reorganize concepts to meet the needs of problem solving.