Here’s a fairly simple one for thinking concretely about the abstraction lattice. Mine an encyclopedia article for topical words (i.e. omit “the” and “and” and their ilk – also omit duplicates, should be fairly easy to program for). Place each word on an index card and have the students arrange them on a large flat surface in order of abstraction – I’d have some large amusing goalposts at either end, but this is not strictly necessary. It should probably be acceptable for some words to be judged equally concrete.
Because this is a collaborative exercise, students will have to talk about what makes a word more or less abstract in order to justify their hypothesis that one word is more abstract than another word. If the concepts in this article had just been presented to them, particularly the section about superconcepts, I hope such discussions will help students become more adept at making those judgements. Using an encyclopedia article is only one of many ways to keep the words vaguely related to one another and hence more comparable – my instinct that this will help may not be accurate, in which case a random selection of X words from the dictionary will suffice. I expect that’d come out in testing.
(An alternate version splits the students into Team Abstract and Team Concrete, with the former responsible for seeing words that are more abstract than their current position and remedying this, and the latter with the inverse task. Then swap for a different lexicon. I’m not sure what effect that would have beyond or indeed specific to priming bias, and I’d be interested to see whether the alternate version consistently produces different results to the original version, and if so in what way, but that’s an entirely different rationality lesson, I think.)
Here’s a fairly simple one for thinking concretely about the abstraction lattice. Mine an encyclopedia article for topical words (i.e. omit “the” and “and” and their ilk – also omit duplicates, should be fairly easy to program for). Place each word on an index card and have the students arrange them on a large flat surface in order of abstraction – I’d have some large amusing goalposts at either end, but this is not strictly necessary. It should probably be acceptable for some words to be judged equally concrete.
Because this is a collaborative exercise, students will have to talk about what makes a word more or less abstract in order to justify their hypothesis that one word is more abstract than another word. If the concepts in this article had just been presented to them, particularly the section about superconcepts, I hope such discussions will help students become more adept at making those judgements. Using an encyclopedia article is only one of many ways to keep the words vaguely related to one another and hence more comparable – my instinct that this will help may not be accurate, in which case a random selection of X words from the dictionary will suffice. I expect that’d come out in testing.
(An alternate version splits the students into Team Abstract and Team Concrete, with the former responsible for seeing words that are more abstract than their current position and remedying this, and the latter with the inverse task. Then swap for a different lexicon. I’m not sure what effect that would have beyond or indeed specific to priming bias, and I’d be interested to see whether the alternate version consistently produces different results to the original version, and if so in what way, but that’s an entirely different rationality lesson, I think.)