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The Understanding by Design Handbook
Understanding Understanding
Excerpt: Pages 12-14
Facet 1: Explanation
Definition: Sophisticated and apt explanations and theories, which provide knowledgeable and justified accounts of events, actions, and ideas.
We see something moving, hear a sound unexpectedly, smell an unusual odor, and we ask: What is it? . . . When we have found out what it signifies, a squirrel running, two persons conversing, an explosion of gunpowder, we say that we understand.
—Dewey, 1933, pp. 137, 146
Why is that so? What explains such events? What accounts for such an effect? How can we prove it? To what is this connected? How does this work? What is implied?
✓ A cook explains why adding a little mustard to oil and vinegar enables them to mix. The mustard acts as an emulsifier.
✓ A 10th grade history student provides a well-supported view of the causes of the American Revolution.
× A 10th grade student knows the facts of the Boston Tea Party and the Stamp Act but not why they happened and what they led to.
Facet 1 involves the kind of understanding that emerges from a well-developed and supported theory, an explanation that makes sense of puzzling or opaque phenomena, data, feelings, or ideas. It is understanding revealed through performances and products that clearly, thoroughly, and instructively explain how things work, what they imply, wherethey connect, and why they happened.
As Dewey (1933) put it, to understand something "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" (p. 137) (emphasis in original). A student reveals an understanding of things—an experience, a lesson by the teacher, a concept, or an individual performance—when the student can give good reasons and telling evidence to support the claims.
Knowledge of Why and How
Understanding is thus not mere knowledge of facts, but knowledge of why and how, laid out in evidence and reasoning. We know that the Civil War happened, and we can perhaps cite a full chronology. But why did the war happen? What was its impact? A student who can explain why steam, water, and ice, though superficially different, are the same chemical substance better understands the chemical formula H20 than someone who cannot. To understand in this sense is to connect facts and ideas, including seemingly odd, counterintuitive, or contradictory ones, into a theory that works. More thorough or in-depth understandings involve more insightful and systematic explanations, where many diverse events or data are linked and subsumed under more powerful principles.
When we understand in this way, we can make inferences and offer predictions: We can go beyond the information given to make connections and associations. We understand guiding principles that explain and give value to the facts. Illuminating mental and physical models are one result of such understanding. We can bind together seemingly disparate facts into a coherent, comprehensive, and helpful account. We can predict unsought for or unexamined results, and we can illuminate strange or unexamined experiences.
Warranted Opinions
Explanatory understandings go beyond true opinions (mere right answers) to warranted opinions, a person's ability to explain his opinion so that he can justify how he got there and why it's right. Educators call upon learners to reveal their understanding by using such verbs as explain, justify, generalize, support, verify, prove, and substantiate. Regardless of the subject matter, or the age and sophistication of a student, when the student understands in the sense of Facet 1, she has the ability to "show her work," explain why the answer is right or wrong, give valid evidence and argument for a view, and defend that view against other views if needed. The student with the most in-depth understanding in this sense explains diverse data more precisely and grasps the subtler aspects of the ideas or experience in question.
Teachers invariably describe this type of understanding as thorough, nuanced, and in-depth (as opposed to merely glib or grandiose theorizing). An explanation or theory without such understanding is typically not so much wrong as incomplete or naïve. It is not wrong to say that the Civil War was fought over slavery, or that literature often involves good versus evil—just naïve or simplistic.
Merely learning and giving back on tests the official theory of the textbook or teacher are not adequate evidence of understanding. Facet 1 calls for a student to be given assignments and assessments that require an explanation of varied and novel events before the teacher can conclude that the student understands what was taught.
Implications for Instruction and Assessment
Instructionally, this facet suggests that we deliberately seek a better balance between knowledge transmission (through a teacher and text) on the one hand and student theory building and testing on the other. A simple strategy is to make sure students have to ask the 5 "W" questions at the heart of journalism: who, what, where, when, and why.
Facet 1 calls for building units around questions, issues, and problems that demand student theories and explanations, such as those found in problem-based learning and effective hands-on and minds-on science programs. Other implications for assessment are straightforward—use assessments (e.g., performance tasks, projects, prompts, and tests) that ask students to explain, not simply recall; to link specific facts with larger ideas and justify the connections; to show their work, not just give an answer; and to support their conclusions.
Note from the authors: Much information in this chapter is from Wiggins & McTighe (1998). We provide it here to give readers the conceptual framework of Understanding by Design.
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