Abstraction: Seeing Structure
Have you ever felt like you were standing in the middle of the forest and all you could see were the trees?
(photo: Jeff Weese [CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)] Links to an external site.)
When what you really needed was to see the bigger picture so you could get your bearings and know where to go?
This feeling is so common that there's even a saying in English, "you are missing the forest for the trees." In the classroom, this happens when students are overwhelmed by the enormity of information and do not know how to focus on the "big picture" or the core elements of a situation. Your job as a teacher is to help students learn how to weed out the minutia and details to help them see the core ideas or structure to a problem.
Probably one of the most important functions of learning to abstract information is the ability to focus on its core structure. The ability to see key details and structure is actually so important that it comprises several first grade standards in the Utah Core (see https://www.uen.org/core/core.do?courseNum=4210 Links to an external site.).
English Language Arts Reading Standards for Literature:
Reading: Literature Standard 1—Ask and answer questions about key details in a text.
Reading: Literature Standard 2—Retell stories, including key details, and demonstrate understanding of their central message or lesson.
Reading: Literature Standard 3—Describe characters, settings, and major events in a story, using key details.
When helping children learn to write a story, they might initially feel overwhelmed by the many details their story might include (seeing the trees). But as a teacher, you will teach them to abstract the main elements of a story into a beginning, middle, and end (seeing the forest). As students grow more mature in their understanding of stories, you can teach them to abstract other key details, such as setting, plot, and character development.
The ability to package key ideas into a single concept enables learners to focus and what is most important and to get a firm understanding of the main structure of a situation. This aspect of abstraction is often utilized when planning a project. You might help students to abstract important information by providing them with a planning guide, similar to the following worksheets that we once used when helping them to make a "Choose Your Own Adventure" Scratch project.
Worksheet 1:
The first worksheet shows the "forest" or the grand overview of the their story, in which they will write the key choices that will be presented for that scene. This is called a flow diagram and helps students to see/plan how the different choices they offer to their users will guide the story. It is often referred to as the "10,000 foot view."
Worksheet 2:
The second worksheet we used to help students focus on key details, helped them to plan what would happen on each slide. While there are more details in this part of the story than in the flow diagram, it still abstracts the key elements to focus on one specific part of the story. You might refer to this as the "1,000 foot view."
Abstraction is important from even the earliest stages of a project. Once a learner has decomposed the different parts of their project and identified patterns, provide them with tools to help them focus on the key elements of their project. Some other techniques you might use to teach students to abstract information are:
- Concept mapping (try using MindMeister, Canva, MindMup, Inspiration, or Kidspiration)
- Diagrams
- Timeline
- Cause-effect diagrams
- Venn Diagram
While using a planning guide takes more time up front, in the end, it usually saves students a good deal of time and it anchors their understanding of a project as they are able to see its core structure and focus on the key details that they need to develop. As they learn to abstract these key details, they will become better computational thinkers.