5 kinds of understanding and metaphors: Missing pieces in pedagogical taxonomies

This post posits 5 levels or types of understanding to help us better to think about the role of metaphor in explanation:

1. Associative understanding: Place a concept in context without any understanding.
2. Dictionary understanding: Repeat definitions, give examples, and make basic connections.
3. Inferential understanding: Make useful inferences based on knowledge about – but without ability to use the understanding in practice. Requires more than just one concept.
4. Instrumental understanding: Use the understanding as part of work in a field of expertise. Impossible to acquire for an isolated concept.
5. Creative understanding: Transform understanding of one domain by importing elements from another. Requires instrumental understanding – goes beyond hints and hunches.

It makes other claims worth discussion:

• 1 and 2 are the most common outcomes of schooling but they have the least use.
• Pedagogy has a meaningful role to play only in the transition from 2-3 but most of the work to achieve instrumental understanding happens through work that does not depend on the pedagogical approach.
• Going from 3 to 4 is significantly more effort than going from 2 to 3.

Submitted June 14, 2019 at 03:55PM by techczech http://bit.ly/31Bj907