Final exams vs. projects – nope, false dichotomy: a practical start to the blog year (by Grant Wiggins)
Students who know can:
- Recall facts
- Repeat what they’ve been told
- Perform skills as practiced
- Plug in missing information
- Recognize or identify something that they’ve been shown before
Whereas students who understand can:
- Justify a claim
- Connect discrete facts on their own
- Apply their learning in new contexts
- Adapt to new circumstances, purposes or audiences
- Criticize arguments made by others
- Explain how and why something is the case
IF understanding is our aim, THEN the majority of the assessments (or the weighting of questions in one big assessment) must reflect one or more of the phrases above.
In the Applied Physiotherapy module that we teach using a case-based learning approach, we’re trying to structure our feedback to students in terms that help them to construct their work in ways that explicitly address the items listed above. We use Google Drive to give feedback to students as they develop their own notes, and try to ensure that the students are expressing their understanding by creating relationships between concepts.
One of the major challenges has been to shift mindsets (both students’ and facilitators’) away from the idea that knowing facts is the same as understanding. As much as we try to emphasise that one can know many facts and still not understand, it’s still clear that this distinction does not come easily to everyone. Both students and some colleagues believe that knowing as many facts as possible is the key to being a strong practitioner, even though the evidence shows that decontextualised knowledge is not helpful in practice situations.
The list above, describing what students understanding “looks like”, is helpful in getting our facilitators and students who struggle with the shift in thinking, to better grasp what we’re aiming for.