UBD Flashcards
6 Facets of Understanding
- Can explain—via generalizations or principles, providing justified and systematic accounts of phenomena, facts, and data; make insightful connections and provide illuminating examples or illustrations.
- Can interpret—tell meaningful stories; offer apt translations; provide a revealing historical or personal dimension to ideas and events; make the object of understanding personal or accessible through images, anecdotes, analogies, and models.
- Can apply—effectively use and adapt what we know in diverse and real contexts—we can “do” the subject.
- Have perspective—see and hear points of view through critical eyes and ears; see the big picture.
- Can empathize—find value in what others might find odd, alien, or implausible; perceive sensitively on the basis of prior direct experience.
- Have self-knowledge—show metacognitive awareness; perceive the personal style, prejudices, projections, and habits of mind that both shape and impede our own understanding; are aware of what
Facets of understanding: Explanation
An explanation is a sophisticated and apt theory, which provides a justified account of phenomena (events, facts, ideas, etc)
Facets include:
- The Why and How
- Causes and implications
- connections
- illustrations and examples
Answers the questions:
- Why is that so/ Why is that true?
- What explains such events?
- What accounts for such action?
- How can we prove it?
- To what is this connected?
- What is an illustrative example?
- How does this work?
- What is implied?
- Why not .. ? (explaining away counterexamples)
Not mere regurgitation of theories or facts, (recall/recognition) but the ability to “justify” or “support” answers (analysis/synthesis)
Facets of Understanding: Interpreting
Interpretation: interpretations, narratives, and translations that provide meaning.
The object of interpretation is meaning, not merely a plausible account. Interpretation traffics in powerful stories, not abstract theories, for its insights. Understanding of this kind occurs when someone sheds interesting and significant light on current or past experience.
A “story” is more than a language arts concept. The meanings and patterns we ascribe to all events, data, or experiences transform our understanding and perception of particular facts.
The student possessing this understanding can show an event’s significance, reveal the data’s importance, or provide an interpretation that strikes a deep chord of recognition and resonance.
All interpretations are bound by the personal, social, cultural, and historical contexts in which they arise. On
On the other hand, not just anything goes. Some understandings of a text, work of art, person, or event are more insightful or defensible than others; a reading, a history, or a psychological case is stronger than another by virtue of its coherence, thoroughness, and documentation. The pinnacle of educational expertise, for example, is a personal dissertation—and its defense.
Explanation and interpretation are thus related but different. Theory is general; interpretations are contextual and specific. The act of interpretation is more fraught with inherent ambiguity than the act of theory building and testing: we may not agree on the right theoretical explanation but we expect there to be only one theory surviving by the end. But there will always be as many meanings as there are thoughtful interpreters.
A theory needs to be true in order to work; a story need only have verisimilitude and provide illumination. The existence of three competing theories for the same physical phenomenon is intellectually unacceptable, but the existence of many different plausible and insightful interpretations of the same human events is not only acceptable but enriching to meaning.
Students must have activities and assessments that ask them to interpret inherently ambiguous matters—far different than typical “right answer” testing. Schooling cannot be the learning of what someone else says is the significance of something, except as a way to model meaning-making or as a prelude to testing the interpretation so as to better understand the possibilities. To be educated for autonomous intellectual performance as adults, students need to see how disciplinary understandings are built from the inside. Examples include inviting students to fashion an oral history out of disparate interviews, to develop a mathematical conclusion out of messy data, or to create an artistic interpretation subject to peer review, based on a careful reading. In short, students must have firsthand knowledge of the history of knowledge creation and refinement if they later are to find meaning in knowledge.
Answers the questions:
What does it mean? Why does it matter? What of it? What does it illustrate or illuminate in human experience? How does it relate to me? What makes sense?
Facets of Understanding: Application
The abillity to use knowledge effectively in new situations and diverse contexts
We show our understanding of something by using it, adapting it, and customizing it.
Application of understanding is a context-dependent skill, requiring the use of new problems and diverse situations in assessment.
Demonstrating application in a learened of familliar environment is NOT evidency of understanding as it does not meet Piaget’s criteria of “Reinvention”
Application requires a new and unfamiliar problem or situation that requires a student to re-invent and adapt his current understanding of the theory in order to successfully solve a problem
The adequacy of the final product may be judged in terms of:
a. the effect it has on the reader, observer, or audience,
b. the adequacy with which it has accomplished the task, and/or
c. evidence on the adequacy of the process by which it was developed.
Questions
How and where can we use this knowledge, skill, or process?
How should my thinking and action be modified to meet the demands of this particular situation?
Facets of Understanding: Perspective
Critical and Insightful Point of view
The ability to take a dispassionate and impartial point of view. To consider and approach a problem from different perspectives and vantage points
It’s the mature recognition that any answer to a complex question involves a point of view
exposes unquestioned assumptions, conclusions and implications
Novices lack the ability to deliberately consider different perspectives.
Perspective involves deliberately weighing different plausible explanations and interpretations
Its the abillity to grasp the point of view behind a theory or answer
Questions: From whose point of view? From which vantage point? What does this look like from a different perspective? What does my critics say? What is assumed or tacit that needs to be made explicit and considered? What is justified or warranted? Is there adequate evidence? Is it reasonable? What are the strengths and weaknesses of the idea? Is it plausible? What are its limits? So what?
