What is the relationship of concepts to facts?

Concepts and facts are very similar – the difference lies in their level of constraint.  Facts are known pieces of information.  They are static and unyielding and beyond questioning.  Concepts are notions or ideas and as such are more open to interpretation and change.  They can be constantly updated and adapted to suit new information.  They have a much broader focus when compared to the narrowness of facts.

I think many teachers focus on relaying facts as a way of delivering information to their students, however this is a dull affair for children and can lead to disinterest which is not a good state of mind for fostering true learning.  Concepts can be formulated and attained through discovery.  Students are allowed the freedom to form ideas with the guidance of their teacher and a curious active mind is better for successful learning.

This isn’t to say that facts aren’t important to the process.  Knowing certain facts can be the building blocks upon which concepts can be formed.  In concept attainment, the attributes of the exemplars are often facts which drive the categorization process.  The problem with facts is they don’t set students on a path of exploration.  Knowing when the Spanish Armada was launched is not nearly important as examining the whys surrounding the event.  Being shown how to carry the one while adding columns of numbers is not as critical as being shown the importance of place value, or examining the concept of adding numbers in bases other than 10.  Math was always a difficult subject for me because I was always shown the shortcuts and the hardline facts associated with it and never really “played” with the numbers.  It’s enough to get you through basic math, but not when you start to get to higher or theoretical math because you find you haven’t laid a proper foundation for the new learning.

Looking at Bloom’s taxonomy of intellectual processes the knowledge of facts is the lowest level.  “Knowledge involves the rather elementary skill of recalling, or remembering specific information or experiences (Scheuerman, 2017).  By comparison, teaching concepts allows one to move to successively higher levels of information processing as the student works through and explores their own thought processes.  Joyce, Weil and Calhoun (2015) write that concept attainment “strategies nurture an awareness of alternative perspectives, a sensitivity to logical reasoning in communication, and a tolerance of ambiguity” (Joyce, p. 145, 2015).  This represents a level of awareness and learning that is far more effective than the mere memorization and recitation of facts. 

It’s as Jerome Bruner writes about in The Culture of Education (1996) – you can give a child a list of facts, but this information is pointless unless it can be transferred into some sort of usable form and can be applied in multiple situations and connected to other information they already possess.  Students become much more active participants in the learning process when concepts are taught versus the passive role they take when they are just being presented with facts.

Bruner, J. (1996). The Culture of Education (from SIS Session 3 Lecture notes EDU 6526: Survey of Instructional Strategies)

Joyce, B., Weil, M., & Calhoun, E. (2015). Models of Teaching. Boston: Pearson Education. Ed. 9.

Scheuerman, R. (2017). EDU 6526: Survey of Instructional Strategies.  (SIS Session 3 Lecture notes on Bloom’s Taxonomy).