Taxonomies for understanding - “ What is understanding”

The purpose of  teaching is inter alia that students should learn something; i.e., they should attain some level of understanding and skills. However, the term ‘understanding’ is used for many different things such as one student’s capacity to name main concepts involved in topic X and another student’s critical comparison of practical implications of theoretic models of topic X. These two uses of ‘understanding’ are different and embody both surface and deep understanding, respectively. According to Wittgenstein, words get their meaning from their use: “Nur in der Praxis einer Sprache kann ein Wort Bedeutung haben” (Wittgenstein, 1991, p. 344), but the usage of ‘understanding’ is ambiguous, hence its meaning is not clear. In Sausurre’s (1997, pp. 12-13) terminology, one could say that the term ‘understanding’ is a double entity constituted by one distinct succession of syllables (syllables), but multiple meanings (signification) linked to the syllables. Some clarity is therefore needed when one for instance explains the kind of understanding of topic X that is intended by the teacher and that will be tested at an examination. Skemp (1987, pp. 152-163) defined two types of understanding. ‘Instrumental understanding’ is “rules without reasons” for instance that you ‘understand’ that to divide a fraction by a fraction “you turn it upside down and multiply”. ‘Relational understanding’ occurs when one has built up a conceptual structure (schema) of topic X and therefore both know what to do and why when one solves a problem within that topic. However, Skemp’s distinction does not formulate a gradual development or levels of understanding.

 There are several taxonomies describing various levels of understanding. Gall (1970) presented an overview of eight of these of which Bloom’s is probably the most well known. These have been developed inter alia to classify questions “based on the type of cognitive process required to answer the question” (Gall, 1970, p. 708). Gall furthermore stated: “I have organised the categories to show similarities between the systems. It appears that Bloom’s Taxonomy best represents the commonalities that exist among the systems” (Gall, 1970, p. 710). Lewis (2007) gave a rather similar overview of five taxonomies. 

These taxonomies have been further developed but the basic ideas are still the same and particularly Bloom’s Taxonomy is still very widely used. However, they were not developed specifically with university teaching in mind and furthermore Bloom did not make his taxonomy with the purpose of formulating ILOs but to be able to select representative tasks for an examination (Biggs & Collis, 1982, p. 13). Below we therefore present a taxonomy for understanding “understanding” particularly aimed at assessing university students’ competencies. Following the discussion from above, this taxonomy distinguishes between “learn (to do)” and “learn about”. Lists of “learn about” are content statements using nouns listing the concepts and areas of knowledge that the students will encounter during the course. But this is not the same as what they “learn (to do)”. Curricula writers need to ask themselves what they want the students to get out of meeting these areas of knowledge; i.e., what do they want the students to learn to do? When assessing a student, we cannot actually measure the student’s knowledge “inside the brain”. What we can do, however, is to have a student do something, and then measure the product and/or the process. Therefore, it is important to focus on what the student does and on what the students are supposed to “learn (to do)”, i.e. what competencies the students are expected to have by the end of the course. As generally advocated in Outcomes-Based Education (OBE); in particular, in Constructive Alignment (Biggs, 2003), we therefore focused on having course descriptions with ILOs formulated using verbs stating what the students should be able to do by the end of the course. Having these things made explicit furthermore makes it easier to explain to the students what they are supposed to get out of a course.