Understanding isn’t just knowledge (and how we can teach it) – Christian Moore-Anderson

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The knowledge-understanding problem is perennially debated. Many sense a difference and argue that we should ensure students learn knowledge and understand it. But others claim that understanding doesn’t exist beyond what you know.

The issue begins with an assumption: knowledge is something stored, something we have.

This appears generally acceptable. But then, if this is the case, where would understanding be stored? It doesn’t seem right that we’d have memory for knowledge and separate memory for understanding. Some claim, therefore, that understanding is nothing but something mystical and without substance beyond knowledge.

This problem is easily solved, however, when we approach the distinction from a different direction. And it’s easily seen through an example most teachers have experienced: exam questions.

We don’t judge the knowledge students have

Gregory Bateson (1972) said that examinations were like measuring pieces of paper by throwing stones at them. The more stones that hit, the larger the paper. When testing our students, we prompt them with questions and see how well they respond.

We could measure a piece of paper directly using a precision tool like a ruler. But we can’t do that with knowledge; no one has direct access to the knowledge in the mind. Hence, we end up throwing questions and tasks at students.

The problem lies here. People assume knowledge and understanding must be stored somewhere, that people have them. But they can’t actually measure them directly, and we end up measuring something else.

Instead of objectively measuring knowledge or understanding, we only ever measure how students respond to the challenges we give them. We measure how they act.

When we design an assessment, we begin by thinking, "If students have learnt XYZ, I’d expect them to be able to do these tasks and do these questions." We also decide what form of response represents good enough learning for the level of the course. We observe our students’ actions, in writing, speaking, or other forms of performance, and judge whether they are knowledgeable.

Pragmatically, knowledge is whether or not a teacher thinks your actions are adequate for the task. If a student’s exam answers are good enough, they’ll consider them knowledgeable.

Knowledge is adequate action according to someone’s judgment.

This is the definition given by the founders of enactive cognitive science, Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, and which I use in Teaching Meaning. I want to add to this to give teachers a way of distinguishing between knowledge and understanding.

Bringing objective measures of knowledge into being

When I discuss this with people, they worry about poor judgments of knowledge. What if a teacher is wrong, and a student really does know what they’re talking about? One person’s judgment can’t deny that some people are knowledgeable. This is true, but how would we ever know?

We’d need a second opinion, of course, a more expert teacher who can make finer distinctions and better inferences. And if this judgment were to satisfy us, we’d still be relying on someone’s assessment of a student’s actions. This second teacher just had a different criterion for what they considered adequate action.

As schools, we often defer our ability to judge knowledge to an exam board, a community of experts. This community then deliberates what adequate action is in an exam and classifies those actions into grades according to the knowledge they represent. Objectivity here is really a community’s way of regulating and aligning its conversations through shared standards and protocols for judging action (Di Paolo 2023).

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Distinguishing knowledge from understanding

On standardised exams in my subject, science, we could make a practical distinction between two types: those that test their knowledge and those that test their understanding. The form of these questions makes the distinction obvious.

Observing knowledge

Think of exam questions that ask students to do things they’re expected to have done before: identifying features, naming facts, carrying out procedures, giving the typical explanations, and solving the usual problems. These are the things that appear in the textbooks, the exam syllabus, and the curriculum documents. Teachers are expected to have taught them, and students are expected to adequately reproduce them.

If they can handle these questions, we consider the students to have learnt; they are knowledgeable. These are the questions that test knowledge.

Observing understanding

Think of exam questions that present students with previously unseen contexts, ones they haven’t been taught. These questions, in biology, can lead to comical upset from students who protest that they’d "never been taught...