Hilda Taba believed that students make generalizations only afterdata are organized. She believed that students can be led toward making generalizations through concept development and concept attainment strategies. In A Teacher's Handbook to Elementary Social Studies , Hilda Taba describes generalizing as a higher order of thinking when compared to forming concepts.
Generalizations like concepts, are the end products of a process of an individual's abstracting from a group of items of his experience those elements of characteristics the items share, and expressing his recognition of this commonality in a way that is convincing to others. The two major differences between concepts and generalizations are, first of all, that in generalizations the verbal form of the process is expressed as a sentence rather than a word or phrase as in the case of concepts, and second, that generalizations are here taken as representing a higher level of thinking than concepts in that they are a statement of relationships among two or more of these concepts. (1971, p. 72)
Taba, H., Durkin, M. C., Fraenkel, J. R., & NcNaughton, A. H. (1971). A teacher's handbook to elementary social studies: An inductive approach (2nd ed.). Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
For more on deductive and inductive reasoning, refer to the Reed College Doyle Owl.