Learning with and Teaching for Understanding

Bill Cerbin

UW-La Crosse

Background Paper Prepared for the Wisconsin Teaching Fellows Summer Institute
July 24-August 3, 2000
This paper is a selective summary of some basic ideas about learning with understanding and teaching for
understanding. It is intended for Teaching Fellows who do not have extensive background in this area.

Author’s address
Bill Cerbin, Professor of Psychology and Assistant to the Provost
145 Main Hall, UW-La Crosse, La Crosse, WI 54601
Phone: 608-785-6881 Fax: 608-785-8046 email: cerbin.will@uwlax.edu
 2

In even the most mature person, understanding is a mixture of insight and misconception,
knowledge and ignorance, skill and awkwardness.
(Grant Wiggins in Understanding by Design)

A fundamental goal of teaching is to advance students’ understanding. As our courses unfold we expect
students to do more than simply accumulate information; we want them to develop ideas and achieve a
grasp of the subject matter. We realize that students will not become experts in a mere 15 weeks, but we
do expect them to deepen their understanding of important concepts and principles. It seems perfectly
reasonable to assume that if students work hard they should leave our classes better able to use the
knowledge of our fields in other classes and other situations.

About 10 years ago I began to recognize that students in my classes were not, in fact, achieving the kind
of understanding I had hoped. They could demonstrate a certain kind of learning—mainly they could
repeat back ideas they had studied. But, if asked to use those ideas in new contexts, they typically failed.
Sometimes they ignored disciplinary ideas altogether and used their “own knowledge” to solve problems.
But, it became clear that the disciplinary ideas were on loan and not a permanent part of their knowledge.
During the last 10 years I have been trying to do something about the problem of student
understanding—by investigating what, how and why students learn or do not learn with understanding
from my teaching.

I believe, as Diana Laurillard contends that

Teachers need to know more than their subject. They need to know the ways it can be understood,
what ways it came to be understood, what counts as understanding: they need to know how
individuals experience the subject. But they are neither required nor enabled to know these things.
(Laurillard, Rethinking University Teaching)

This paper is a selective summary highlighting basic concepts about learning with understanding and
teaching for understanding. These ideas provide a broad conceptual framework for thinking about how
students learn with understanding and some of the implications for teaching for understanding. These
could be quite helpful for teachers who want to investigate student understanding in their own classes.

Learning with Understanding

Learning with understanding is a “sense making” activity. Understanding develops as a person uses what
s/he already knows (i.e., prior knowledge) to construct meaning out of new information. Learning with
understanding is like working a jig saw puzzle—the person determines relationships and connections
among new ideas and facts and prior knowledge—just as one takes new pieces out of the box and tries to
determine their relationship to the puzzle pieces already assembled on the board.

As a person renders new information sensible, his or her knowledge about the topic not only increases
quantitatively, but changes qualitatively by becoming more differentiated and elaborated. The result is a
representation or mental model that structures the conceptual knowledge. In contrast, rote learning is a
process in which the person tries to copy new information into memory. Although, the individual may be
able to replicate the material, he or she does not necessarily grasp the relationships among the ideas and
facts. Alfred North Whitehead, referred to this as “inert knowledge,” information the person can recall but
cannot use productively for other thinking or problem solving. (See Rote Learning vs. Learning With
Understanding)
 3

John Dewey described the process of learning with understanding as one in which the individual develops
a well differentiated, elaborated mental representation of the topic.

To grasp the meaning of a thing, an event or situation is to see it in its relations to other things; to
note how it operates or functions, what consequences follow from it; what causes it, what uses it can
be put to. In contrast, what we call the brute thing, the thing without meaning to us is something
whose relations are not grasped. (Dewey, How We Think)

Learning with understanding then is a sense-making/meaning-making/knowledge-building activity. It

results from mental acts in which a person creates/builds/establishes/determines new relationships and
connections among facts and ideas. As understanding develops, the learner’s mental model of the subject
matter becomes more highly differentiated.

Some researchers view understanding more like an ability and less like a mental model or mental
representation of knowledge. In this view understanding is an ability to think and act flexibly with what
one knows. Understanding, in other words, is not simply constructing an idea, but being able to use the
idea in various ways. As Harvard psychologist David Perkins says,

Understanding is a matter of being able to do a variety of thought-provoking things with a topic,

such as explaining, finding evidence and examples, generalizing, applying, analogizing and
representing the topic in new ways.

. . . understanding is being able to carry out a variety of actions or “performances” that show
one’s grasp of a topic and at the same time advance it. It is being able to take knowledge and use
it in new ways. . . such performances are called “understanding performances” or “performances
of understanding.”

. . . learning for understanding is like learning a flexible performance—more like learning to

improvise jazz or hold a good conversation or rock climb than learning the multiplication table or
the dates of the presidents or that f = ma. Learning facts can be a crucial backdrop to learning for
understanding, but learning facts is not learning for understanding.
(Perkins, Teaching For Understanding)

The representational and performance models of understanding are complimentary. Learning with
understanding produces a well differentiated mental model in which the person establishes relationships
and connections among facts and ideas. But learning with understanding also entails using knowledge in
ways that demonstrate and advance students’ grasp of the subject matter..

Human beings are disposed to make sense out of new information, events and experiences. In academic
settings, learning with understanding sometimes is straightforward and effortless. In school, students read
a book, listen to a teacher, hold a discussion, write a paper and may develop reasonable understanding of
the subject. But, very often learning with understanding is slow, full of false starts, hesitations, and
difficult. In fact, it may be far more difficult than we anticipate. Contemporary research in psychology
and education indicates that many students acquire little more than passing familiarity with the subjects
we teach. Based on a review of research, Howard Gardner concluded that

. . . an ordinary degree of understanding is routinely missing in many, if not most students. It is

reasonable to expect a college student to be able to apply in a new context a law of physics, or a proof
in geometry, or a concept in history of which she just demonstrated mastery in her class. If when the
 4
circumstances of testing are slightly altered, the sought-after competence can no longer be
documented, then understanding—in any reasonable sense of the term—has simply not been achieved.
(1991, The Unschooled Mind, p.6)

The prevailing view among researchers is that deep understanding is not an automatic consequence of
being taught or trying to learn. Attaining deep understanding of a subject is not simply a matter of paying
attention in class and studying hard. Students can devote many hours to learning and come away with
relatively little understanding of the subject. Teachers can engage students in many types of learning
experiences—lectures, discussions, projects, experiential learning—and students can come away with
relatively little understanding of the subject.

Factors that Complicate Learning with Understanding

The Prior Knowledge Problem. An important factor that influences new learning is what the student
already knows, believes, and understands about the subject. Learning with understanding is difficult when
students either have misconceptions about the subject or lack differentiated knowledge of the subject.

A large research literature shows how students’ preconceptions, misconceptions and stereotypes can be
formidable obstacles to new learning. (For an excellent review of this literature see, The Unschooled
Mind, by Howard Gardner.) Misconceptions not only can thwart new learning, but can reappear after a
person has seemingly shed the misconception and learned the “correct” ideas. For example, research on
learning science concepts shows that many college students hold incorrect ideas about physics at the
beginning of a college level course. These students can take a physics class and learn the concepts
correctly. However, soon after completing the course, they revert back to their pre-course misconceptions
of physics. (See the Science Misconceptions handout)

A misunderstanding is still an “understanding,” but differs from consensually held beliefs about the topic.
For example, in the well known video program, “A Private Universe,” Harvard graduates were asked to
explain what accounts for seasonal change (i.e., why it is hot in summer, cold in winter). Most of them
mistakenly asserted that seasonal change is due to the distance between the earth and the sun at various
times during the year. These intelligent people probably studied the “correct” version of seasonal change
at some point in their schooling. Nonetheless, when asked for an account they used “distance-from-the-
sun” as a plausible explanation for seasonal change.

If you accept the idea that learning with understanding is a process in which a person tries to make sense
out of new information by connecting it to prior knowledge and establishing relationships among ideas,
then it should come as no surprise that misunderstanding and misconceptions are common, natural
consequences of learning with understanding. As one learns, one’s understanding might be distorted,
misguided, tangled, wrong-headed, and so on. The opening quotation by Grant Wiggins underscores the
notion that misunderstanding is not confined to novice learners, but an inherent part of making meaning.

The Inert Knowledge Problem. A second dilemma is the problem of inert knowledge or lack of transfer of
learning. We know that knowledge and skills learned in one situation often do not transfer to new
contexts in which they are relevant (Salomon and Perkins, 1989; Bransford and Schwartz, 1999). Even
when students seem to have a reasonable grasp of the subject, they have difficulty transferring newly-
learned ideas to new situations. This condition is so persistent and pervasive that it warrants special status
as an inherent learning problem. Teachers have no trouble citing instances of knowledge transfer
problems in their classes. It seems that students, even when they appear to know something, often cannot
use what they know in new situations to interpret, analyze, evaluate, or solve novel problems. That is,
even when students can “think about” the subject matter, they may not be able to “think with it.”
 5
Transfer of learning is a multifaceted problem. A recent series of studies by Dan Schwartz and John
Bransford at Vanderbilt University examined conditions that foster knowledge transfer. They studied
students in an upper level college psychology class who were learning about memory theories. The
researchers “measured” students’ understanding by having them make predictions about a memory
experiment. This requires students to use their knowledge of memory theories to figure out how the
results of a new experiment might turn out, i.e., transfer knowledge to a novel situation. Transfer of
learning to a new problem is good evidence of understanding.

The study compared students in three different learning conditions. One group of students read and
summarized a text on memory theories, and then listened to a lecture designed to help them organize their
knowledge and learn with understanding. (Note: This is a typical sequence in many classes—students
read the material and then hear a lecture about it.) A second group did not read the text at all. Instead they
were given simplified data sets from several memory experiments and were asked to compare them. The
data sets were chosen to illustrate “contrasting cases” or important differences between the studies. After
analyzing the data, students heard the same lecture as group one. The third group did not read the text or
hear the lecture. Instead they spent twice as much time as group two analyzing and comparing the
contrasting data sets.

Group 2 (analyze material + listen to lecture) outperformed the other two groups—these students made
almost three times as many accurate predictions as did either group one (read + write a summary + listen
to lecture) or group 3 (double the amount of analysis but no lecture). The combination of analysis and
lecture produced better understanding. The group that only analyzed the studies did as well as the group
that read and summarized the material and heard the lecture. What accounts for the difference in
performance? The analysis of the contrasting data sets prepared students to learn from the lecture. The
analysis helped students develop more differentiated knowledge of the subject, which combined with the
explanatory framework of the lecture to produce deeper understanding of the material. The lecture was
necessary as indicated by the poor performance of the group that only analyzed the data sets. Moreover,
simply summarizing the text, did not prepare students to benefit from the lecture. Although they certainly
must have learned and remembered the reading material, their undifferentiated knowledge did not prepare
them to grasp the explanatory framework presented in the lecture.

Design Principles that Support Learning with Understanding

Through much of the 18th, 19th and even 20th centuries, teachers of English, as well as other subjects,
believed that with proper grammar, people could in Lindley Murray’s 1795 phrase, “transfuse. . .
sentiments into the minds of one another” (1849, p.5). That is, knowledge could be conveyed directly
through words and could be apprehended directly by anyone having adequate facility in the language.
(George Hillocks in Ways of Thinking, Ways of Teaching, p.19)

Most teachers know that even when they present flawless, crystal clear explanations students can develop
misunderstandings. But as Hillocks suggests, the belief that teachers can, in fact, copy meaning into the
minds of learners is deeply entrenched in the epistemologies of educators. Even though we cannot
transmit meaning into the minds of students, we tend to teach as though we can. Teachers can provide
information that might be accessible to the minds of students, but students have to construct meaning
from the information they receive.

We need to consider how our teaching helps students develop understanding. That is—how can we help
students to construct the “right kind of meaning?” Many educators have adopted active learning
pedagogies to engage students in the kind of thinking that leads to deeper understanding of the subject
matter (e.g., problem-based learning, project-based learning, case-based learning, cooperative learning,
service learning, and varieties of learning with new technologies). Each of these approaches has its
 6
advantages and virtues. Rather than compare these approaches, it may be more fruitful to consider design
principles and considerations that support learning with understanding regardless of the overall
pedagogical approach.

Knowledge Worth Understanding. A serious concern is the question of what we want students to
understand and know how to do with what they learn. Given the fact, that the development of deep
understanding is a hard fought endeavor, we need to be sure that we ask students to learn important
disciplinary knowledge and not just fragments or isolated concepts. At the very least this means we ought
to identify the concepts and ideas we want to endure beyond the course and dedicate more time and
attention to these.

Learning Goals. Learning goals should create a need for students to understand. Beyond that, there should
be a close connection between learning activities and the conceptual knowledge you want students to
develop. Teachers need to ask how or in what ways specific learning activities (assignments, exercises,
presentation of information, etc) engage students in making sense out of the subject matter. For example,
in a traditional lecture format, students may do little more than transcribe information. However, as the
Schwartz and Bransford studies show, an explanatory lecture can facilitate students’ understanding if they
are adequately prepared to make use of it. Even in active learning approaches, the “doing” sometimes
takes precedent over “doing with understanding.” As one designs an activity for students it seems
essential to ask the question—how will this experience engage students in important sense-making,
meaning-making, knowledge-building activities related to the subject matter.

Scaffolds that Support Student Understanding. A scaffold is any support or process that helps a person
solve a problem or achieve a goal which would be beyond their unassisted efforts. Scaffolds do things
like: 1) provoke students to notice gaps, inconsistencies, bugs in what they have learned, 2) engage
students in taking stock of and reconsidering what they already know, and 3) involve students in
structuring and restructuring knowledge.

Teaching for understanding might be construed as a process of scaffolding students learning with
understanding—providing scaffolds to increase the chances that students will advance their learning with
understanding. The analysis of data sets in the Schwartz and Bransford study is an example of a scaffold.
The analysis engaged students in structuring and restructuring knowledge, noticing features between
different sets of data, etc. That type of analysis was more beneficial than reading and summarizing text
material prior to a lecture.

Performances of understanding that reveal students’ understanding can also help to advance it. For
example, when students try to explain a concept to someone else (not just to a teacher on a test), they
reveal their understanding. In addition, the act of developing an explanation engages the kind of mental
connection-making that drives knowledge building. In addition, trying to explain something often leads
the “explainer” to recognize gaps in their thinking, sending the learner back to the drawing board.

Another example of scaffolding comes from my own problem-based learning classroom. In the early
phases of problem solving my students explore a complex problem situation and generate questions about
what kinds of additional information they need to define the problem. During this phase I give them new
information about the problem situation in response to their questions. Sometimes, I am able to see where
students are headed with a particular set of questions and give them new information that will conflict
with or contradict their hunches. For example, in my educational psychology class, students typically
believe that self-esteem is the reason for all kinds of learning problems and school failure. My students
have a number of serious misconceptions about self esteem and its role in learning. When I see their self
esteem theory surfacing in a new problem situation, I can sometimes provide information that will lead
them to conclude that self esteem is not the important factor in the problem.
 7

Another similar scaffold is to provide students with alternative perspectives and interpretations at a
critical juncture in a problem solving episode. In many active learning approaches students are in
situations where they are trying to advance their own understanding and get beyond what they already
know or what they initially learned about a subject. Sometimes in problem solving groups, students are
unable to provide sufficient challenges to one another. The group often settles too quickly on the first
plausible reason for a problem. One way to get students to reconsider their initial interpretations is to
expose them to alternative “expert” perspectives that highlight ideas the students overlooked or did not
think relevant.

Good scaffolding supports and challenges students as they try to make sense out of the material. In order
scaffold effectively, teachers need to be attuned to the way students think about the subject and to the
kinds of problems they are likely to have. This entails a kind of “cognitive empathy” in which the teacher
can look at the situation from students’ perspectives, and determine how to assist them in taking the next
steps toward better understanding.

The Critical Role of Assessment. Good assessment is a key feature of teaching for understanding.
Students need to become familiar with the criteria and standards against which their understanding will be
evaluated. They also benefit from being able to compare their own efforts to more advanced models. And,
they benefit from self corrective feedback—information they can use to improve their own understanding.
This is a tall order given the complex, multidimensional nature of understanding.

How do we know someone understands something? It is relatively easy to determine whether a person
can remember something. You ask a question and then compare the answer to the original information.
Teachers go so far as to quantify their judgments—the person knew X% of the information. Assessing
understanding is messier. Understanding exists in degrees; not in an all or none state. Partial
understanding is the norm in most matters. What does it mean, for example, to say that you understand
something? Do you understand the novel, Moby Dick, or understand the Constitution of the United States,
or understand the calculus, or understand the game of baseball? On most matters, a person’s
understanding is somewhere between two extremes with abject ignorance on one end and deep
understanding on the other.

No Clue---------1----------------l-------------------l------------------l--------------l------------Deep Understanding

Toward the “no clue” end of the continuum we would say the person’s understanding is incomplete,
underdeveloped, naïve, inchoate, half-baked, incipient, superficial, or trivial, Toward the “deep
understanding” end of the continuum we would say the person’s understanding is rich, elaborate,
profound, thorough, expert, or well developed. Moreover, misunderstanding and misconceptions can be
part of the individual’s grasp of a subject.

In order to make judgments about relative degree of understanding, we need to identify the qualities that
differentiate superficial from deep understanding. If you just test a person’s recall of information you can
be fairly confident that they know something. But, evaluating understanding is not as simple as counting
up the number of correct answers. Instead one has to deal with depth, quality, levels, shades and
distortions of understanding as opposed to making all or none judgments.

So how do we evaluate a person’s grasp of a subject—their learning with understanding? The answer lies
in creating situations and tasks for students through which they reveal their differentiated knowledge and
their capacity to use their knowledge flexibly. I recommend two outstanding sources on which to build
your own assessment strategies. One is Teaching for Understanding and The Teaching for Understanding
Guide developed by researchers at Harvard. They explain how to devise “performances of understanding”
 8
which they define as “activities that require students to use knowledge in new ways or situations. In such
activities students reshape, expand on, extrapolate from, apply, and build on what they already know.
Performances of understanding help students to build as well as demonstrate their understanding. Their
model also uses a comprehensive rubric that distinguishes among different aspects of understanding and
different levels of performances within each aspect. (See the TfU handout.)

A second model comes from the work of Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe and can be found in
Understanding by Design and The Understanding by Design Handbook. Wiggins and Mc Tighe focus on
six facets of understanding—explanation, interpretation, application, perspective, empathy, and self-
knowledge. Students reveal their understanding through their ability to explain or interpret or achieve
perspective, etc. In each case, it is possible to make meaningful qualitative distinctions among different
“levels” of each facet. (See the Six Facets handout.)

Frequent Opportunities for Formative Assessment and Revision We all know that learning is very
difficult without feedback about one’s performance. Too often students get feedback after their final
effort. They complete a project or paper and then the teacher evaluates it. The final grading episode is
more like an autopsy than a diagnosis of the work and how to make it healthy.

Understanding develops over time and students need feedback along the way to help them correct and
advance their own ideas. Pure feedback is information that shows a person what they know or what they
just did in relation to a goal or standard. Feedback is not criticism, praise, blame or guidance—it is just
information that depicts one’s performance. If I run a race, the time clock at the finish line gives me
feedback about my performance—it doesn’t praise me, criticize me, or tell me how to run a better race.
But, I can use good feedback to compare my performance in relation to others or to my own goals.

A classic example of good feedback is cited in Grant Wiggins’ book, Educative Assessment: Designing
Assessments to Inform and Improve Student Performance. The episode takes place in a high school
industrial arts class in which students learn how to weld together two pieces of metal. The teacher has
placed a set of welds on a table that vary in quality from poor to outstanding. Before students hand in their
own products they have to stop by the table and compare their work to the models. Time after time
students are observed scanning the models with their own weld in hand. Then with no prompting from the
teacher they return to their stations to re-work the piece.

The challenge to all teachers is to develop a system that provides self corrective feedback, information
about students’ understanding that tells then how they are doing in relation to a standard. Feedback can
come from the teacher, other students or from models of past and present student work. Good feedback is
a kind of scaffolding that helps the student appraise his or her own level of learning.

Social Structures and Interaction that Promote Understanding. Constructivist learning theory contends
that knowledge is socially negotiated and constructed. However, this does not mean that all social
interaction leads to deep knowledge of a subject. Even well developed interactive approaches like
cooperative learning do not necessarily advance students’ understanding of subject matter. The traditional
cooperative learning model specifies how to make groups “work together” to accomplish mutual goals
(Johnson, Johnson, and Schmidt, 1998). But there is nothing built into the cooperative learning model that
guarantees students will learn with understanding.

In recent years, some researchers have been creating and studying innovative learning environments. One
model has been particularly successful in developing students’ understanding through collaborative effort.
The Community of Learners (CoL) approach by Ann Brown and Joseph Campione structures the
classroom so that students (in this case older elementary school children) do in fact develop
 9
understanding. I quote this work at length because it illustrates a comprehensive way to design for
understanding.

In the community of learners classroom, students are encouraged to engage in self-reflective

learning and critical inquiry. They act as researchers who are responsible, to some extent, for
defining their own knowledge and expertise. In the community of learners classroom, teachers are
expected to serve as active role models for learning and as responsive guides to students'
discovery processes. Teachers learn to provide instruction on a need-to-know basis, which allows
them to respond to students' needs, rather than to a fixed scope and sequence schedule or an
inflexible lesson plan (Brown & Campione, 1990, 1996). Instead of emphasizing breadth of
coverage, the content of the curriculum features a few recurring themes that students come to
understand at increasingly sophisticated levels for explanatory coherence and theoretical
generality. In addition, the technological environment is designed to foster an intentional learning
environment, not to drill and practice or program (Scardamalia & Bereiter, 1991), thereby
encouraging student reflection and discussion. Finally, in the community of learners classroom,
methods of assessment focus on the students' ability to discover and use knowledge, rather than
focusing on basic retention, and on-line dynamic measures of performance are as important as
static measures of product.

In a community of learners science classroom students participate in research teams, systematically

pursuing answers to important questions and working on consequential tasks. The teams in fact, do
everything that adult scientists do when they create new knowledge in their fields—systematic
investigation, peer review, and gradual acceptance of new ideas by the community.

Assessment in community of learners classrooms indicates that students make significant progress in the
ability to use new knowledge to interpret new concepts and solve new problems. In large measure these
gains are due to the fact that collective analysis, inquiry, revision and general “knowledge worrying” are
built into the work students do. The type of inquiry-oriented discourse that emerges in the class is not an
accident, but a product of the way the classroom is designed to foster certain kinds of thinking and
exchange of ideas.

Summary

There is no single teaching approach that advances students’ understanding better than all others.
However, research is beginning to uncover design principles important for TfU. These include building
classes around ideas worth understanding, scaffolds that support understanding, assessment that provides
self corrective feedback, and knowledge-building social interaction. These principles can be adapted to
most instructional circumstances, and are important consideration as teachers investigate the development
of student understanding in their own classes and disciplines.
 10
Teaching for Understanding References

The first four references are excellent starting points for theory, research and practice related to teaching
for and learning with understanding.

Bransford, John D., Brown, Ann L., & Cocking, Rodney R. Editors 1999. How people learn: Brain, mind,
experience and schooling. Washington, DC: National Academy Press.
This book-length report summarizes important developments in the science of learning. Accessible
to a non-specialist audience, the book examines such topics as differences between novices and
experts, conditions that improve students’ ability to apply knowledge to new circumstances and
problems, the design of learning environments, teacher learning, and effective teaching in history,
mathematics, and science. This volume provides teachers with a thorough grounding in
contemporary theory and research, and highlights important implications for teaching.

Stone Wiske, Martha. Editor 1998. Teaching for understanding: Linking research with practice. San
Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers.
This book is the product of a six-year collaborative research project by school teachers and
researchers at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Although it focuses on pre-collegiate
teaching, it is applicable to university-level teaching as well. According to the TfU model, there
are four fundamental elements in teaching for understanding—generative topics that afford
possibilities for deep understanding in a subject, goals that explicitly state what students are
expected to understand, performances of understanding through which students develop and
demonstrate understanding, and ongoing assessment. The book provides interesting examples of
these elements from actual classrooms and examples of student performance. This volume should
be valuable for any instructor who views better student understanding as a primary goal of the
scholarship of teaching. The TfU framework has helped me think about teaching for understanding
in a more systemic and integrative way.

Wiggins, Grant 1998. Educative assessment: Designing assessments to inform and improve student
performance. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers.
This book, a precursor to Understanding by design by the same author, challenges common
assessment practices and offers a comprehensive approach to the design and practice of
assessment intended to improve student performance. The book examines authentic assessment,
the nature of feedback, how to use assessment to promote understanding, how to assess
understanding, how to design assessments and create assessment systems. It is itself an important
contribution to the scholarship of teaching that provides fundamental grounding is how and why to
evaluate student learning and performance. I have used the book extensively to develop a more
consistent assessment philosophy and also as a handbook to guide in the design of assessment
materials.

Wiggins, Grant and McTighe, Jay. 1998. Understanding by design. Alexandria, Virginia: Association for
Supervision and Curriculum Development.
This book proposes that understanding is revealed to the extent that one can explain, interpret, apply,
empathize, and have perspective and self-knowledge. The authors describe a process by which
teachers can design experiences and materials to be consistent with these facets of understanding. A
key component of the process is a way to assess understanding. Toward this end, they offer a rubric
that defines different “levels” of understanding and suggest ways to evaluate different facets of
understanding. This is a valuable book for those who want to translate abstract notions of
understanding into concrete, observable aspects of student performance. I have used their model to
help clarify and assess the quality and depth of understanding in my investigations of student
learning.
 11
Additional References and Web-Based Resources Related to
Teaching for and Learning with Understanding

Bransford, J.D. and Schwartz, D.L. (in press). Rethinking transfer: A simple proposal with educational
implications. In A. Iran-Nejad & P.D. Pearson (Eds.), Review of Research in Education, (Vol. 24).
Washington, DC: American Educational Research Association.

Cerbin, W. (1999). The development of student understanding in a problem-based educational psychology

course. The work I have done on problem-based learning in my own classes is located at
http://kml.carnegiefoundation.org/gallery/bcerbin/

Dewey, J. (1933). How we think. New York: D.C. Heath.

Gardner, H. (1991). The unschooled mind: How children think and how schools should teach. NY:
Basic Books.

McTighe, J. & Wiggins, G. (1999). The understanding by design handbook. Alexandria, VA. Association
for Supervision and Curriculum Development/

Perkins, D.N. (1998). What is understanding. In M.S. Wiske. Teaching for understanding: Linking
research to practice. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Schwartz, D.L. & Bransford, J.D. (1998). A time for telling. Cognition and Instruction, 16(4), 475-522.

Williams, S.M. & Hmelo, C.E. (1998). Learning through problem solving. Journal of the Learning
Sciences, 7(3&4).

Wiske, M.S. (1998). Teaching for understanding: Linking research to practice. San Francisco: Jossey-
Bass.

Online Resources and Materials

Understanding by Design website http://ubd.ascd.org/index.html

Problem-based learning sites. For an extensive comparison of PBL to other types of teaching approaches
see http://www.imsa.edu/team/cpbl/whatis/matrix/matrix2.html which is part of the Center for Problem-
based Learning site at the Illinois Math and Science Academy, http://www.imsa.edu/team/cpbl/cpbl.html

For an extensive online bibliography of material about PBL see

http://www.newcastle.edu.au/services/iesd/learndevelop/problarc/bibliography.html which is part of the
Problem-Based Learning and Assessment Research Centre (PROBLARC) site at the University of
Newcastle, Australia, http://www.newcastle.edu.au/services/iesd/learndevelop/problarc/

Two www sites that include links to PBL resources around the world are Samford University at
http://lr.samford.edu/PBL/index.html and the University of Delaware http://www.udel.edu/pbl/