Library Instruction Glossary
This glossary is primarily excerpted from Wiggins and McTighe's Understanding by Design, Expanded 2nd Edition.
Application
One of the six facets of understanding; the ability to apply knowledge and skill in diverse situations provides important evidence of the learner’s understanding. Key term in Bloom’s taxonomy, different from “plugging in” and “fill in the blank” answers.
Assessment
Techniques used to analyze student accomplishment against specific goals and criteria. Good assessment requires a balance of techniques because each technique is limited and prone to error. Tests are one type of assessment—others include interviews, observations, self-assessments, and surveys. A teacher can assess a student’s strengths and weaknesses without placing a value or grade on the performance.
Authentic assessment/authentic task
An assessment composed of performance tasks and activities designed to simulate or replicate important real-world challenges. The heart of authentic assessment is realistic performance-based testing—asking the student to use knowledge in real-world ways, with genuine purposes, audiences, and situational variables.
Authentic assessments are meant to do more than “test”: they should teach students (and teachers) what the “doing” of a subject looks like and what kinds of performance challenges are actually considered most important in a field or profession. The tasks are chosen because they are representative of essential questions or challenges facing practitioners in the field.
Backward design
An approach to designing a curriculum or unit (or lesson) that begins with the end in mind and designs toward that end. Although such an approach seems logical, it is viewed as backward because many teachers begin their unit design with the means—textbooks, favored lessons, and time-honored activities—rather than deriving those from the end—the targeted results, such as content standards or understandings. We advocate the reverse of habit: starting with the end (the desired results) and then identifying the evidence necessary to determine that the results have been achieved (assessments). With the results and assessments clearly specified, the designer determines the necessary (enabling) knowledge and skill, and only then, the teaching needed to equip students to perform.
Big idea
Core concepts, principles, theories, and processes that should serve as the focal points of curricula, instruction, and assessment. By definition, big ideas are important and enduring. Big ideas are transferable beyond the scope of a particular unit. Big ideas are the building material of understanding. They can be thought of as the meaningful patterns that enable one to connect the dots of otherwise fragmented knowledge.
A big idea can also be described as a ‘linchpin’ idea. The linchpin is the pin that keeps the wheel in place on an axle. Thus, a linchpin idea is one that is essential for understanding, without which the student cannot go anywhere.
Bloom’s Taxonomy
Concept
A mental construct or category represented by a word or phrase. Concepts include both tangible objects (chair, elephant) and abstract ideas (bravery). Overarching understandings are derived from concepts.
Coverage
A teaching approach that superficially teaches and tests content knowledge irrespective of student understanding or engagement. The term generally has a negative connotation: it implies that the goal is to march through a body of material within a specified time frame.
Criteria
The qualities that must be met for work to measure up to a standard. Criteria should be considered before the design of specific performance tasks. Designing a task that measures critical thinking requires knowing beforehand what the indicators of such thinking are, and then designing the task so that students must demonstrate those tasks through performance. An assessment must also determine how much weight each criterion should receive relative to other criteria.
Design
To plan the form and structure of something or the pattern or motif of a work of art. In education, teachers are designers in both senses, aiming to develop purposeful, coherent, effective, and engaging lessons, units, and courses of study and accompanying assessments to achieve identified results. To say that something happens by design is to say that it occurs through thoughtful planning as opposed to by accident or by ‘winging it.’ At the heart of UbD and IlbD is the idea that what happens before the teacher gets into the classroom may be as or more important than the teaching that goes on inside the classroom.
Desired result
A specific educational goal or achievement target. In UbD/IlbD, Stage 1 sums up all desired results. Common synonyms include target, goal, objective, and intended outcome. Desired results in education are generally of 5 kinds:
- Factual or rule-based declarative knowledge
- Skills and processes
- Understandings, insights derived from inferences into ideas, people, situations, and processes
- Habits of mind
- Attitudes
Though they involve complex learnings, the desired results must be cast in measureable terms. Any valid assessment, in other words, is designed to measure the degree to which the learner’s work hits the target.
Empathy
One of the six facets of understanding. Empathy, the ability to “walk in another’s shoes,” to escape one’s own emotional reactions to grasp another’s, is central to the most common colloquial use of the term understanding. When we “try to understand” another person, people, or culture, we strive for empathy. It is thus not simply affective response; it is not sympathy. It is a learned ability to grasp the world from someone else’s point of view. It is the discipline of using one’s imagination to see and feel as others see and feel, to imagine that something different might be possible, even desirable.
Enduring understandings
The specific inferences, based on big ideas, that have lasting value beyond the classroom. In thinking about enduring understandings, teachers are encouraged to ask, “What do we want students to understand and be able to use several years from now, after they have forgotten the details?”
Enduring understandings are central to a discipline and are transferable to new situations. Because such understandings are generally abstract in nature and often not obvious, they require uncoverage through sustained inquiry rather than one-shot coverage. The student must come to understand or be helped to grasp the idea, as a result of work. If teachers treat an understanding like a fact, the student is unlikely to get it.
Entry question
A simple, though-provoking question that opens a lesson or unit. It often introduces a key idea or understanding in an accessible way. Effective entry questions spark discussion about a common experience, provocative issue, or perplexing problem, as a lead-in to the unit and essential questions.
Essential question
A question that lies at the heart of a subject or a curriculum, and promotes inquiry and uncoverage of a subject. Essential questions thus do not yield a single straightforward answer, but produce different plausible responses, about which thoughtful and knowledgeable people may disagree.
Explanation
One of the six facets of understanding. Understanding involves more than just knowing information. A person with understanding is able to explain why it is so, not just state the facts. Such understanding emerges as a well-developed and supported theory, an account that makes sense of data, phenomena, ideas, or feelings. Understanding is revealed through performances and products that clearly, thoroughly, and instructively explain how things work, what they imply, where they connect, and why they happened.
Facets of understanding
UbD identifies six kinds of understanding: application, empathy, explanation, interpretation, perspective, and self-knowledge.
Ill-structured
A term used to describe a question, problem, or task that lacks a recipe or obvious formula to answer or solve it. Ill-structured tasks or problems do not suggest or imply a specific strategy or approach guaranteed to yield success. Often the problem is fuzzy and needs to be further defined or clarified before a solution is offered. Such questions or problems thus demand more than knowledge; they demand good judgment and imagination. All good essay questions, science problems, or design challenges are ill-structured: Even when the goal is understood or the expectations clear, a procedure must be developed along the way. Invariably, ill-structured tasks require constant self-assessment and revision, not just a simple application of knowledge transfer.
Interpretation
One of the six facets of understanding. To interpret is to find meaning, significance, sense, or value in human experience, data, and texts. It is to tell a good story, provide a powerful metaphor, or sharpen ideas through an editorial.
Interpretation is thus fraught with more inherent subjectivity and tentativeness than the theorizing or analyzing involved in explanation. Even if one knows the relevant facts and theoretical principles it is necessary to ask, What does it all mean? What is its importance?
Iterative
Requiring continual revisiting of earlier work. An iterative approach is thus the opposite of linear or step-by-step processes. Synonyms for iterative are recursive, circular, and spiral-like. The curricular design process is always iterative; designers keep revisiting their initial ideas about what they are after, how to assess it, and how they should teach to it as they keep working on each element of the design. They rethink earlier units and lessons in light of later designs and results—the learning that does (or does not) occur.
Leading question
A question used to teach, clarify, or assess for knowledge. Unlike essential questions, leading questions have correct and straightforward answers. To call a question leading is not to damn it; leading questions have a useful role in teaching and checking for understanding. But their purpose is quite different, therefore, from the purpose of essential questions.
Open-ended question
A term used to describe tasks or questions that do not lead to a single right answer. This does not imply that all answers are of equal value, however. Rather, it implies that many different acceptable answers are possible.
Outcome
In education, shorthand for “intended outcomes of instruction.” An intended outcome is usually a desired result, a specific goal to which educators commit. To determine if outcomes have been attained requires agreement on specific measures—the assessment tasks, criteria, and standards.
Performance task
Also called “performance.” A task that uses one’s knowledge to effectively act or bring to fruition a complex product that reveals one’s knowledge and expertise. Many educators mistakenly use the phrase “performance assessment” when they really mean “performance test.” A performance assessment involves more than a single test of performance and might use other modes of assessment as well. Tests of performance, whether authentic or not, differ from multiple-choice or short answer tests. In a test of performance, the student must put it all together in the context of ill-structured, non-routine, or unpredictable problems or challenges. By contrast, most conventional short answer or multiple choice tests are more like drills in sports than the test of performance. Real performers must learn to innovate and use their judgment as well as their knowledge.
Perspective
One of the six facets of understanding. The ability to see other plausible points of view. It also implies that understanding enables a distance from a particular objective and carried from place to place for inspection or exhibition.
Prerequisite knowledge and skill
The knowledge and skill required to successfully perform a culminating performance task or achieve a targeted understanding. Typically prerequisites identify the more discrete knowledge and know-how required to put everything together in a meaningful final performance.
Process
In the context of assessment, the intermediate steps the student takes in reaching the final performance or end-product specified by the assessment. Process thus includes all strategies, decisions, subskills, rough drafts, and rehearsals used in completing the final task.
Proposition
A statement that describes a relationship between or among concepts.
Resultant knowledge and skill
Knowledge and skill that are meant to result from a unit of study. In addition to targeted understanding, teachers identify other desired outcomes.
Rubric
A criterion-based scoring guide that enables judges to make reliable judgments about student work and enables students to self-assess. A rubric assesses one or more traits of performance.
Scaffolding
Scaffolding is an instructional strategy that involves gradually decreasing support from the instructor or expert. By providing more guided and interactive support when concepts are new, instructors can help foster a low-stakes environment where students feel comfortable taking risks. Scaffolding also relates to Vygotsky’s concept of the ‘zone of proximal development.’
Some common forms of scaffolding:
- Handouts
- Step-by-step instructions
- Models
- Coaching/encouragement
- Answering questions/giving advice
Self-knowledge
One of the six facets of understanding. Self-knowledge refers to accuracy of self-assessment and awareness of the biases in one’s understanding because of favored styles of inquiry, habitual ways of thinking, and unexamined beliefs. Accuracy of self-assessment in this case means that the learner understands what he does not understand with clarity and specificity. Self-knowledge also involves the degree of awareness of biases and how these influence thinking, perceptions, and beliefs about how the subject is to be understood.
Standard
To ask, What is a standard? Is to question how well the student must perform, at what kinds of tasks, based on what content, to be considered proficient or effective. Thus, there are three types of standards, each addressing a different question. Content standards answer the question, “What should students know and be able to do?” Performance standards answer the question, “How well must students do their work?” Design standards answer the question “What worthy work should students encounter?”
Threshold concepts
Concepts that are central to mastery of a subject. Often, threshold concepts are viewed as irreversible: once you ‘get’ it, you aren’t going to un-get it. Like riding a bike! Threshold concepts also enable new connections within and across disciplines. They often require the revision or reversal of previous understandings, and it can be challenging or impossible to continue moving forward in a field of knowledge without them.
Transferability
The ability to use knowledge appropriately and fruitfully in a new or different context from that in which it was initially learned.
Uncoverage
A teaching approach that is required for all matters of understanding. To uncover a subject is to do the opposite of “covering” it, namely to go into depth. Three types of content typically demand such Uncoverage. The content may be principles, laws, theories, or concepts that are likely to have meaning for a student only if they are seen as sensible and plausible; that is, the student can verify, induce, or justify the content through inquiry and construction. The content may be counterintuitive, nuanced, subtle, or otherwise easily misunderstood. The content may be the conceptual or strategic element of any skill. Such Uncoverage involves clarifying effective and efficient means, given the ends of skill, leading to greater purposefulness and less mindless use of techniques.
Understanding
An insight into ideas, people, situations, and processes manifested in various appropriate performances. To understand is to make sense of what one knows, to be able to know why it’s so, and to have the ability to use it in various situations and contexts.
Visible learning
“Visible learning and teaching occurs when learning is the explicit goal, when it is appropriately challenging, when the teacher and the student both (in their various ways) seek to ascertain whether and to what degree the challenging goal is attained, when there is deliberate practice aimed at attaining mastery of the goal, when there is feedback given and sought, and when there are active, passionate, and engaging people (teacher, student, peers, and so on) participating in the act of learning. It is teachers seeing learning through the eyes of students, and students seeing teaching as the key to their ongoing learning….When students become their own teachers they exhibit the self-regulatory attributes that seem most desirable for learners (self-monitoring, self-evaluation, self-assessment, self-teaching). Thus, it is visible teaching and learning by teachers and students that makes the difference.” (Hattie 2009, pg. 22)