6 FACETS OF UNDERSTANDING

1. Explanation : To ensure students understand why an answer or approach is the

right one. Students explain or justify their responses or justify their course of action.
Explanation asks students to tell the ‘big idea’ in their own words, make
connections, show their work, explain their reasoning, and induce a theory from
data.

2. Interpretation - To ensure students avoid pitfall of looking for the “right answer”
and demand answers that are principled… students are able to encompass as many
salient facts and points of view as possible.
Interpretation requires the student to make sense of stories, art works, data,
situations, or claims. Interpretation also involves translating ideas, feelings, or work
done in one medium into another.

3. Application - To ensure students’ key performances are conscious and explicit

reflection, self-assessment, and self-judgment with reasoning made evident.
Authentic assessment requires a real or simulated audience, purpose, setting, and
options for personalizing the work, realistic constraints, and background noise.
Students who understand can use their knowledge and skill in new situations
(and) place emphasis on application in authentic contexts with a real or simulated
audience, purpose, settings, constraints, and background noise.

4. Perspective - To ensure students know the importance or significance of an idea

and to grasp its importance or unimportance. Encourage students to step back and
ask, “What of it?” “Of what value is this knowledge?” “How important is this idea?”
‘What does this idea enable us to do that is important?”
Perspective is demonstrated when the student can see things from different
points of view, articulate the other side of the case, see the big picture, recognize
underlying assumptions, and take a critical stance.

5. Empathy - To ensure students develop the ability to see the world from different
viewpoints in order to understand the diversity of thought and feeling in the world.
Intellectual imagination is essential to understanding and it manifests itself
not only in the arts and literature but more generally through the ability to
appreciate people who think and act differently than us.

6. Self-Knowledge - To ensure students are deeply aware of the boundaries of their

own and others’ understanding; able to recognize their own prejudices and
projections; has integrity – able and willing to act on what one understands.
…through self-assessment we gain complete insight into how sophisticated
and accurate students’ views are of the tasks, criteria, and standards they are to
master.