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Understanding
What is understanding?
Understanding is
the ability to connect a representation to many other representations. If you understand something in only one or two ways, you scarcely understand it at all.1)
a psychological process related to an abstract or physical object, such as a person, situation, or message whereby one is able to think about it and use concepts to deal adequately with that object. 2)
a relation between the knower and an object of understanding.3)
Understanding understanding
Other suggested aspects of understanding are4):
Understanding has many operational deffinitions based on subject area. For example: understanding language, understanding mathematics, understanding one's behaviour. One specific definition is therefore not the only possible method for measuring.
Teaching, learning and assessment methods depend on the definition of understanding that wants to be achieved. A broader repertoire of teaching styles and strategies = broader understanding.
Understanding of a concept is a continuum, not a dichotomous state.
Understanding is to complex to be assessed by only single style of test, or satisfactorily represented by one single numerical score.
We suggest that:
Types of understanding
White and Gunnstone suggest the following forms of understanding6):
Conceptual understnading - set of memory elements one associates with the label; improved by better memory, better connections or more clarity in elements' formulation
Understanding whole disciplines (?)
Understanding single elements of knowledge - grammar, procedures, rules
Understanding extensive communication - a poem, speech, painting, ballet, block of text
Understanding situations - seeing paralells between a situation and previous experiences; having a script for it
Understanding people - seeing paralells between a person's actions and their previous actions, and being able to predict actions
Wiggins and McTighe suggest, as an alternative (or supplement) to Bloom's Taxonomy of Learning outcomes, the “6 Facets of Understanding”, claiming students can demonstrate their understanding if they can:
Explain
Interpret
Apply
Have perspective
Empathize
Have self-knowledge
Failures of Understanding
Diagnosed failures of understanding can be caused by7):
Too few connections
Wrong connections (misunderstanding)
Not having an index for retrieval (i.e. not knowing a word)
Wrong symbols used in index (a communication failure)
We suggest that, since understanding is a function of acquired elements of knowledge and relations between them, all failures of understanding are caused by:
Assessing understanding
Assessment of understanding is usually reffered to as assessment of conceptual understanding. This is achieved using the carefully developed multiple-choice tests (concept inventories) that examine conceptual understanding on a narrow set of topics.8) Questions used in the assessment are supplied with potential answers addressing common student misunderstandings. Some authors combine multiple-chioce and open-ended questions.9)
“
The questions were intended to assess conceptual understanding of the learning goals rather than simple factual recall.”
10)