assignment

‘Understanding Understanding’.

This article is focused on clarifying the term ‘understanding’, because from the earliest times, many curriculum writers have avoided the notion, producing confusion mainly among teachers. However, others have tried to give to this term a definition but without the accuracy required because of the existence of different degrees of understanding, what brings serious difficulties to provide evidences, in order to define this nebulous term.
For example, according to Bloom’s taxonomy, ‘understanding’ refers to the ‘commonly sought’, ‘but ill- defined’ objectives. This obstacle provokes that teachers, in most of the cases, confuse whether their students are only able to internalize knowledge or indeed understand the contents taught. The difference seems slight but it is not, that is why many authors have highlighted the distinction that exists between ‘understanding’ and ‘know’. According to Bloom the first term is defined as ‘the ability to marshal skills and facts wisely and appropriately, through an effective application, analysis, synthesis and evaluation’. In simple words, it is the capacity that students should have to transfer what they have learnt to a new setting or situation.
Based on that, it is fundamental to help the students to learn how they can transfer their inherently limited learning to many other settings. If we take in to account the latter, we will see that transfer must be taken as the aim of all teaching in schools, and not only the fact of storing information that in most of the cases is just forgotten by the learners.
Undoubtedly, it is a mistake to think that ‘the more I cover, the more they will learn and the better they will do in a test’. It proves that quantity has nothing to do with the success in terms of application of knowledge. This misunderstood has broken out that most of the teachers focus the lessons in just conveying information without considering the application that it may have in other issues or problems. Thus, coverage should not be seen as ‘a virtue in an educational context’, but rather as ‘a flaw in the current system’, because it leaves the students with no sense of the whole what affects the development of their intellectual capacities, producing confusion in the information given. The other crucial stage in this process is the way in which the understanding is showed, because there is also a wrong focus on our tests. Commonly teachers tend to measure only the superficial knowledge acquired by their students and not their capacity to transfer information. As we can see, the misperception of the word ‘understanding’ has drawn us to make serious mistakes related to the aim of teaching and learning process. There is not doubt that this way of thinking should change from now on, because the fulfillment of these practices will help us considerably to improve the quality of Chilean education, giving the right and necessary tools to students to be applied by them in any setting.