Teaching for understanding, taken at face value, is hardly a controversial recommendation,

and it is something that all teachers would likely assert they are already doing. However, to
ensure that it is done effectively, we need to carefully consider what teaching for
understanding entails. In fact, quite a lot of research and scholarly work has been carried out
in this regard. This document summarizes much of this work, organized around three
fundamental questions:
1. Why teach for understanding?
2. What is understanding?
3. How does one successfully teach for understanding?

Before beginning an analysis of understanding and how to teach for understanding, consider
why we should focus on teaching for understanding. What do researchers say about the need
and benefits?
As stated in a recent book on the subject, ―These new demands [of the 21st Century] cannot
be met through passive, rote-oriented learning focused on basic skills and memorization of
disconnected facts… [We need] learning that enables critical thinking, flexible problem
solving, transfer of skills, and use of knowledge in new situations‖ (Darling-Hammond
2008, p. 2).
Similarly, McLaughlin and Talbert (1993) state that, ―With respect to outcomes of this sort
(problem solving, critical analysis, higher-order thinking, or flexible understanding of
academic subject matter), the success of the American educational system—and particularly
American high schools—has been called into question... Teaching for understanding
promises to enhance the kinds of cognitive outcomes for students that the American
educational system has heretofore been notoriously ineffective at producing‖ (p. 2).
Pellegrino (2006) discusses the need for deep understanding in developing expertise: ―To
develop competence and expertise in an area of inquiry, students must have opportunities to
learn with understanding rather than memorizing factual content. Key to expertise is a deep
understanding of subject matter that transforms factual information into ‗usable
knowledge‘‖ (p. 4).
The benefits of teaching for understanding are indicated by research done on ―authentic
pedagogy‖ (Newman, Marks, & Gamoran 1995, as cited in Darling-Hammond 2008): ―For
example, a study of more than twenty-one hundred students in twenty-three restructured
schools found significantly higher achievement on intellectually challenging performance
tasks for students who experienced ‗authentic pedagogy,‘ instruction focused on active
learning in real-world contexts calling for higher-order thinking, consideration of
alternatives, extended writing, and an audience for student work‖ (pp. 12 and 64).
In a review of research in mathematics education, Grouws and Cebulla (2000) note many
benefits of teaching for understanding: ―There is a long history of research, going back to the
1940s and the work of William Brownell, on the effects of teaching for meaning and
understanding in mathematics. Investigations have consistently shown that an emphasis on
teaching for meaning has positive effects on student learning, including better initial
learning, greater retention, and an increased likelihood that the ideas will be used in new
situations. These results have also been found in studies conducted in high-poverty areas‖
(p. 13).
When learning facts and procedures in any discipline, especially with respect to the
important construct of transfer, Bransford et al. (2000) highlight the importance of
understanding: ―Transfer is affected by the degree to which people learn with understanding
rather than merely memorize sets of facts or follow a fixed set of procedures‖ (p. 55).
Related to this and connecting procedural knowledge to conceptual knowledge, Grouws and
Cebulla (2000) found that, ―Students who develop conceptual understanding early perform
best on procedural knowledge later‖ (p. 15).
Perkins (1993) succinctly captures the need for teaching for understanding: ―We must teach
for understanding in order to realize the long-term payoffs of education‖ (p. 30). Now the
questions to consider are ―What is understanding?‖ and ―How do we teach for
understanding?‖

We often talk about understanding in terms of mental constructs, such as schema, models,
and structures, or in terms of learning performances, such as explaining, reasoning,
analyzing, interpreting, relating, comparing, making analogies, abstracting, conjecturing,
and generalizing. Researchers have asked, is understanding a mental state or a
performance? It is useful to consider it as both. More specifically, researchers have identified
key components of the nature of understanding:

 Connections
 Structures
 Performances
 Constructing Knowledge
 Depth and Type of Knowledge

Making connections has long been identified as a key component of understanding.

 ―[Understanding is] the mental attempt to connect something to something other than
itself.‖ (Bartlett, 1932, from Newton, 2000, p. 27)
 ―[Understanding is] the connecting of facts… the weaving of bits of knowledge into an
integrated and cohesive whole.‖ (Nickerson, 1985, from Newton, 2000, p. 27)
 ―What's needed is a connected rather than a disconnected curriculum, a curriculum full
of knowledge of the right kind to connect richly to future insights and applications.‖
(Perkins, 1993, p. 39)
 ―For students learning science or mathematics [and, one supposes, other disciplines as
well], new ideas take on meaning by the ways they are related to other ideas.‖ (Carpenter
& Lehrer, 1999)

Related to and extending the idea of connections is the notion of mental structures or
schemas.

 ―Only mental structures that answer the question of ‗why‘ deserve to be called
understanding.‖ (Piaget, 1978, from Newton, 2000, p.17)
 ―If much of what we taught highlighted powerful conceptual systems, there is every
reason to think that youngsters would retain more, understand more, and use more of
what they learned.‖ (Perkins, 1993, p. 31)
 ―Over the long run, developing understanding involves more than simply connecting
new knowledge to prior knowledge; it also involves the creation of rich, integrated
knowledge structures.‖ (Carpenter & Lehrer, 1999)
 ―Experts in a subject domain not only ‗know a lot‘—more importantly they organize
knowledge into schemas that support the rapid retrieval and application of such
knowledge.‖ (Pellegrino, 2006, p. 9)

Researchers debate about whether understanding is a performance or a mental state. For

practitioners, it seems productive to consider it as both. Furthermore, these two notions of
understanding are related, in that robust mental schemas help enable understanding
performances.

 ―Understanding a topic of study is a matter of being able to perform in a variety of

thought- demanding ways with the topic, for instance to: explain, muster evidence, find
examples, generalize, apply concepts, analogize, represent in a new way, and so on.‖
(Perkins, 1993, p. 32)
 ―Understanding is the ability to think and act flexibly with what one knows.‖ (Perkins,
1998, p. 40)
 ―[Understanding is] the capacity to take knowledge learned in one setting and apply it
appropriately in a different setting.‖ (Gardner, 1993, p. 4)
 ―Neither basics or skills are worthwhile unless they can be mobilized in significant
performances of understanding.‖ (Gardner, 1998, p. 349)
 ―The conception of understanding as a performance rather than a mental state underlies
[our] entire collaborative research project… The performance view emphasizes
 understanding as the ability and inclination to use what one knows by operating in the
world. It follows that understanding is developed, as well as demonstrated, by
performing one‘s understanding.‖ (Wiske, 1999, p. 237)
 ―When students or teachers acquire knowledge with understanding, they can apply the
knowledge to learn new topics and solve new and unfamiliar problems. When students
or teachers do not understand, they perceive that each topic is an isolated skill. They
cannot apply their skills to solve problems not explicitly taught to them, nor extend their
learning to new topics.‖ (Carpenter & Lehrer, 1999)
 ―A key finding in the learning and transfer literature is that organizing information into a
conceptual framework allows for greater ‗transfer‘; that is, it allows the student to apply
what was learned in new situations and to learn related information more quickly.‖
(Pellegrino, 2006, p. 5)

Understanding is often characterized in terms of students constructing knowledge.

 ―Understanding involves the construction of knowledge by individuals through their own

activity, so that they develop a personal investment in building knowledge.‖ (Carpenter
& Lehrer, 1999)
 ―When you‘ve encountered an idea in your own way and brought your own thinking to
bear, the idea becomes more a part of you… it‘s a part of your own experience.‖
(Gardner, 1993, p. 6)
 ―Somehow it is always the subject-matter being fed to him rather than him feeding on
the subject-matter. If any real competence is to be attained it is essential for the student
to construct his own personal version of the discipline.‖ (Eraut, et al. 1975, p. 33, in
Hounsell, 1997, p. 245)

An analysis of understanding also includes analyzing the nature of knowledge. Two aspects
of knowledge particularly relevant to the discussion here are depth of knowledge and type of
knowledge. For example, in a review of cognitive science research Willingham (2002)
describes three levels of knowledge: rote, inflexible, and deep structure, and Star (2005)
argues for the value of both procedural and conceptual knowledge, as long as both are deep.

 ―We rightly want students to understand; we seek to train creative problem solvers, not
parrots. Insofar as we can prevent students from absorbing knowledge in a rote form, we
should do so.‖ (Willingham 2002, p. 31)
 ―Knowledge tends to be inflexible when it is first learned. As you continue to work with
the knowledge, you gain expertise; the knowledge is no longer organized around surface
forms, but rather is organized around deep structure.‖ (Willingham 2002, p. 33)
 Star (2005) suggests that we should be careful not to conflate type of knowledge with
depth of knowledge. Separating out these two dimensions yields the following table,
where ―XX‖ indicates the goal of deep knowledge of both concepts and procedures.
 Conceptual Knowledge Procedural Knowledge

Superficial Knowledge

Deep Knowledge XX XX

Several research teams have developed recommendations for successfully teaching for
understanding. The following section provides summaries from six: Darling-Hammond
(2008), Perkins (1993), Wiske (1999), Gardner (1993), McLaughlin and Talbert (1993), and
Carpenter and Lehrer (1999).
According to Darling-Hammond (2008) in the book Powerful Learning: What We Know
about Teaching for Understanding, ―Looking across domains, studies consistently find that
highly effective teachers support the process of meaningful learning‖ by:

 Creating ambitious and meaningful tasks

 Engaging students in active learning
 Drawing connections to students‘ prior knowledge
 Scaffolding the learning process
 Assessing student learning continuously
 Providing clear standards and constant feedback
 Encouraging strategic and metacognitive thinking
(Darling-Hammond, 2008, p. 5)
Perkins (1993) identifies ―six priorities for teachers who teach for understanding:‖

 Make learning a long-term, thinking-centered process.

 Provide for rich ongoing assessment.
 Support learning with powerful representations.
 Pay heed to developmental factors.
 Induct students into the discipline.
 Teach for transfer.
(Perkins, 1993, pp. 34-37)
Elaborating on these points, Perkins (1993) asserts that:

 ―If understanding a topic means building up performances of understanding around that

topic, the mainstay of learning for understanding must be actual engagement in those
performances. The learners must spend the larger part of their time with activities that
ask them to generalize, find new examples, carry out applications, and work through
 other understanding performances. And they must do so in a thoughtful way, with
appropriate feedback to help them perform better.‖ (p. 33)
 ―Teaching for understanding is much more than a matter of method—of engaging
students in understanding performances with frequent rich feedback, powerful
representations, and so on. Besides method, it is also a matter of content—thoughtful
selection of content that proves genuinely generative for students.‖ (p. 31)
 ―If we want transfer of learning from students—and we certainly do, because we want
them to be putting to work in diverse settings the understandings they acquire—we need
to teach explicitly for transfer, helping students to make the connections they otherwise
might not make, and helping them to cultivate mental habits of connection-making
(Brown, 1989; Perkins & Salomon, 1988; Salomon & Perkins, 1989).‖ (p. 38)
 ―The teacher teaching for understanding needs to add more imagistic, intuitive, and
evocative representations to support students' understanding performances. Besides
supplying powerful representations, teachers can often ask students to construct their
own representations, an understanding performance in itself.‖ (p. 36)
Wiske (1999) outlines a pedagogy of understanding: ―A pedagogy of understanding needs
more than an idea about the nature of understanding and its development. A guiding
framework must address four key questions:‖
1. What topics are worth understanding? (generative topics)
2. What about these topics needs to be understood? (understanding goals)
3. How can we foster understanding? (performances of understanding)
4. How can we tell what students understand? (ongoing assessment)
Wiske, 1999, p. 230)
Specifically related to the third question, this research group (Wiske, 1999) emphasizes the
role of ―performances of understanding:‖

 ―The performance view emphasizes understanding as the ability and inclination to use
what one knows by operating in the world. It follows that understanding is developed, as
well as demonstrated, by performing one‘s understanding.‖ (p. 237)
 ―Students [should] spend much of their time engaged in performances of
understanding.‖ (p. 237)
 ―Research teams recognized a common progression of categories of performances
designed to foster understanding: messing about, guided inquiry, and culminating
performances.‖ (pp. 238–39)
 ―Effective performances of understanding do each of the following:‖
 Relate directly to understanding goals.
 Develop and apply understanding through practice.
 Engage in multiple learning styles and forms of expression.
 Promote reflective engagement in challenging, approachable tasks.
  Demonstrate understanding.
(p. 240)
In an interview about teaching for understanding, Gardner (1993) was asked: ―How do these
principles [of teaching for understanding] apply to what teachers do day-by-day with the
kids in their classrooms?‖ Gardner‘s reply highlights important content, generative ideas,
tasks with multiple entry points, and allowing enough time for students to get deeply
involved:

 ―The first question a teacher should ask is, ‗Why am I doing this? Do I believe it‘s
important? Can I convey that to kids?‘ Not just because it‘s the next lesson, or because it
comes from the textbook.
 ―Then, the teachers need to figure out what‘s the very best way to introduce kids to this
phenomenon: what‘s the generative idea, the puzzle, the thing that‘s really going to
compel, maybe because it‘s surprising or intriguing.
 ―Then it‘s important to provide what I call ‗multiple entry points‘. …I‘d say you can
approach almost any rich topic in a whole variety of ways.
 ―You‘ve got to take enough time to get kids deeply involved in something so that they can
think about it in lots of different ways and apply it.‖
( p. 7)
McLaughlin and Talbert (1993) describe new visions of teaching for understanding, which
emphasize more interactive, constructivist approaches to teaching, although not exclusively:

 ―These visions [of teaching for understanding] frame an active role for students as
explorers, conjecturers, and constructors of their own learning. In this new way of
thinking, teachers function as guides, coaches, and facilitators of students‘ learning
through posing questions, challenging students‘ thinking, and leading them in
examining ideas and relationships. Advocates of this approach to practice assume that
what students learn has to do fundamentally with how they learn it.‖ (p. 1)
 ―Teachers need to learn when the interactive, constructivist forms of teaching are called
for and when other less demanding, conventional strategies are appropriate. The vision
of practice engendered by teaching for understanding does not assume transmission
strategies are inappropriate for all tasks. Some learning objectives—learning new
vocabulary in a language class or learning the sequence of key events in a history class,
for example—might be best achieved through drill-and-practice or lectures.‖ (p. 4)
Finally, a long-standing research group in mathematics and science education has done
much work on teaching and learning for understanding (e.g., Carpenter and Lehrer 1999).
They propose ―five forms of mental activity from which mathematical and scientific
understanding emerges:‖
1. Constructing relationships
2. Extending and applying mathematical and scientific knowledge
3. Reflecting about experiences
 4. Articulating what one knows
5. Making mathematical and scientific knowledge one's own.
(http://ncisla.wceruw.org/publications/reports/TFUconcept.html)
In classrooms where such mental activity is fostered:

 Students must be engaged in learning that involves the same generative processes that
we expect them to apply to use their knowledge to learn new ideas and solve unfamiliar
problems in the future.
 Students and teachers initially have difficulty articulating their ideas about an unfamiliar
topic or task. It is through struggling to articulate their ideas, especially in the context of
mathematical and scientific symbols or models, that students develop the ability to
reflect on and articulate their thinking.
 Class activity often involves sharing strategies and ideas with the goal of developing
within the class connections among the different strategies and ideas available to it.
 The classes also are engaged in practices of generating knowledge. Conjectures are
proposed, and the members of the class often work together to refine and validate the
conjectures. Often a number of members of the class are involved in generating and
refining a given conjecture.
 Artifacts adopted by the class become a basis for collective reflection and articulation of
ideas.
 Reflection plays an important role in solving unfamiliar problems. To be reflective in
their learning means that students consciously examine the knowledge they are
acquiring, in particular how it is related to what they already know and to other
knowledge they are acquiring.
(http://ncisla.wceruw.org/publications/reports/TFUconcept.html)

This research brief provides a summary of scholarly work about teaching for understanding,
organized around the questions: What? Why? and How? While the phrase itself, teaching for
understanding, seems obvious enough, this is in fact ―a sea of change in notions of teaching
and learning‖ (McLaughlin & Talbert, 1993, p. 2). Why should we undertake this sea of
change? Ending where we began, recall the statements from different researchers fifteen
years apart with the same message, from the book Powerful Learning: What We Know
about Teaching for Understanding (Darling-Hammond, 2008) and the article ―Teaching for
Understanding‖ (Perkins, 1993):
―These new demands [of the 21st Century] cannot be met through passive, rote-
oriented learning focused on basic skills and memorization of disconnected facts. [We
need] learning that enables critical thinking, flexible problem solving, transfer of skills,
and use of knowledge in new situations.‖ (p. 2)

―We must teach for understanding in order to realize the long-term payoffs of
education.‖ (p. 30)
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& Pellegrino, J. W. (2000). How people learn: Brain, mind, experience, and school. Expanded
Edition. Washington, DC: National Academy Press.
Carpenter, T. P., & Lehrer, R. (1999). Teaching and learning mathematics with understanding. In E.
Fennema & T. A. Romberg (Eds.), Classrooms that promote mathematical understanding (pp.
19–32). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. (Summarized at
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