A FACTOR ANALYTIC STUDY OF THREE TYPES OF CONCEPT ATTAINMENT TASKS
Authors: Manley Myron B. 
Published: August 2014

Investigators of concept attainment have developed and used a wide variety of concept attainment tasks. This has made it difficult, if not impossible, to assess the generality of the results obtained in the various experiments that use different tasks. The purposes of this study were to determine if communalities exist among three types of human concept attainment tasks, and, If so, to relate the factors to previously identified reference factors. The supposition of a common factor or factors was based upon a Mediation Theory. Other purposes of the study were to determine if subjects who solved the tasks used the same abilities that nonsolving subjects used, and to find out if these abilities were used on more than one type of task.

A battery of 16 paper‐and‐pencil reference tests, representing seven previously identified factors, was administered to 119 male ninth‐grade students. The seven factors or ability measures represented were flexibility of closure, induction, associative memory, number facility, general reasoning, syllogistic reasoning, and verbal comprehension. After the reference battery was given, subjects were tested on 12 concepts that represented three types of tasks: nonverbal concepts restricted by the attributes of the stimuli (card sort tasks), nonverbal concepts not restricted by the attributes of the stimuli (Goldstein's tasks), and verbal concepts (Allison's tasks).

Intercorrelations were computed and factor analyses were carried out on the reference test scores and concept attainment error scores for each of the following groups of subjects: total group, N = 119; total solvers of the concept tasks, N = 76; and total nonsolvers, N = 43. Eleven factors were extracted and rotated to an equamax solution for all groups.

Five factors (I, II, III, IV, and V) were clearly defined by the reference tests and were interpreted as numerical ability, reasoning, verbal ability, memory, and selective attention. Two factors (VI and VII) were not clearly defined by either the reference tests or the concept attainment tasks. For reasons of parsimony and continuity with previously identified factors, Factors VI and VII were identified by the highest loadings of the reference tests. Factor VI was called syllogistic reasoning and Factor VII was called general reasoning. Factor VIII was related to the order of presentation of the concept tasks. The remaining factors had loadings for both the reference tests and the concept attainment tasks, although only one type of concept attainment task characterized each factor. The three factors were interpreted as: (a) verbal concept attainment (Factor IX) which involves deductive reasoning; (b) a concept attainment ability (Factor X) that utilizes inductive reasoning; and (c) a concept attainment ability (Factor XI) characterized by the five Goldstein tasks.

It was concluded that (a) communalities do exist between different concept attainment tasks, however, these communalities are restrictive and do not include all tasks within the types defined by this study. Therefore, further analyses of the relationships between concept attainment tasks will be necessary before the results of experiments can be compared if different types of concept attainment tasks are used. (b) Certain reference test abilities are related to certain concept attainment abilities. (c) Nonsolvers, in an attempt to solve concept attainment tasks, use reference abilities that solvers do not use. The reference abilities that nonsolvers use vary with the concept attainment task they are trying to attain.