Tuesday, April 22, 2008

Concept Attainment Game

This past weekend was the Knowles Science Teaching Foundation's Spring Meeting for the '04 cohort (which I'm a part of) in San Diego, CA. Amy Germundson from Virginia (who's working with Carole Ann Tomlinson, a "Differentiated Instruction" genius) worked with our cohort to help us critique a differentiated instruction lesson from our own classrooms: totally helpful. One of the techniques I learned was called Concept Attainment. So here's how you play:

I give Positive Examples and Negative Examples of a principle or pattern and you hypothesize about what the principle/rule is.

Hey, let's try it:

Positive Examples
mud
jersey cows
chocolate

Negative Examples
ripe watermelon
the sun
fresh snow

If you guessed "Things that are brown", then you win!

Do you get how it works? Ok, let's try a harder one:

Positive Examples
Biomass
Wind power
Hydro (dam) power


Negative Examples
Geothermal
Nuclear Fission
Hydro (tidal) power

i'll post the answer in the comments section ;)

1 comment:

anneofvermont said...

Power Sources which are ultimately from the sun.