Blog posts here typically start with research and then consider classroom application. Today’s post — more speculative than most — begins with a concept and then moves to thinking aloud. In brief: I want to explore the concept of “checking for understanding,” and propose a new category of classroom moves that should precede such checks.
Completing the Subject
As an English teacher, I get paid money to explain the grammatical concept of “subject complement” to my students. Let’s consider these sentences:
Joyce is President. She is decisive.
In these sentences, we know that “is” is a linking verb. When we look at the words “President” and “decisive” we see that they offer more information about Joyce. “President” is another word for “Joyce.” “Decisive” describes Joyce.
So, a subject complement completes the subject. Specifically:
A subject complement follows a linking verb, and renames or describes the subject.
“President” and “decisive” are subject complements because they follow the linking verb “is,” and offer more information about the subject Joyce.
In this explanation, I’ve given my students lots to think about. I should stop and check to see how all this information is landing. Specifically, I’m worried about working memory overload. My students have taken onboard new information, and they have to combine that new information with ideas already in long-term memory. Both of those demands — processing and combining new info — can strain working memory to the breaking point.
I can easily brainstorm several questions I might ask at this point to assess working memory function. Here — in a deliberately jumbled order — are four of my potential questions. Please take a minute to sort these questions by their difficulty: that is, which one places the least demand on students’ WM, and which one the most?
- Write a sentence with a subject complement.
- In the paragraph below, convert subject complements into appositives.
- What is the definition of “subject complement”?
- In the sentence below, which word is the subject complement?
[I’m strategically pausing here to give you a chance to think.]
I suspect you came up with this order:
- What is the definition of “subject complement”?
- In the sentence below, which word is the subject complement?
- Write a sentence with a subject complement.
- In the paragraph below, convert subject complements into appositives.
The first question simply asks students to repeat the definition I just gave them. The next three questions ask for application, each one with a greater degree of difficulty than the previous. That is: whereas question 3 is a bit more difficult than question 2, question 4 is MUCH more difficult than question 3.
Checking for Something
Let’s go back to look at those questions. Which of them, in your opinion, measures understanding? That is: you would comfortably say: “If my students can answer question X correctly, they understand the idea of subject complement?”
I myself would say: a correct answer to question 4 starts to demonstrate “understanding.” (Reasonable people might argue that #3 also measures “understanding.” I think “understanding” requires more than “simple application,” but the argument I’m about to make will hold wherever you draw the line on that list of questions.)
Of course, the other three questions give me important data:
- Have my students heard what I said?
- Have they done some basic processing of the idea?
- Has my lesson plan prompted initial encoding?
- Can they apply this new idea in basic ways?
So, I really must ask those first three questions — and others like them — even though they’re not actually helping me know if my students understand.
In my experience, those first three questions would typically fall under the heading “checking for understanding.” However — and here’s the point of my blog post — such questions don’t by themselves verify understanding. For that reason, the phrase “checking for understanding” is misleading. It provides false comfort. Once I’ve asked those questions, I’ve checked for something, but I haven’t yet learned if my students understand.
We need a better label. I have a modest proposal: “checking for uptake.”
Walking before Running
In suggesting this new category, I’m deliberately focusing on very basic parts of teaching. My students can’t capital-l Learn about a topic, can’t capital-u Understand a topic, if they haven’t started basic encoding and processing. “Checking for uptake” doesn’t sound especially glamorous, but the lack of glamour is the point.
Because I’m always focused on working memory, I think checking for uptake questions provide two working-memory benefits.
First: if my students haven’t successfully taken up foundational ideas, they won’t be able to do more advanced cognitive work. I can prevent future WM overload by ensuring that basic ideas are onboard. Checking for uptake helps me solve WM problems before they arise.
In other words: until my students succeed at increasingly challenging checking-for-uptake questions, I shouldn’t even ask checking-for-understanding questions.
In my own teaching, I think one of my greatest failings has been to ask “understanding” questions before my students had fully taken in the ideas I was presenting.
Second: if my students can’t answer checking for uptake questions, I might discover that even my initial explanation overwhelmed working memory. Perhaps my students don’t understand “linking verb” as well as I thought. Perhaps they’re not even clear on the idea of a grammatical subject.
In other words: checking for uptake can both prevent working memory overload in the future and reveal WM overload that might already have happened.
Double Checking
To ensure that we don’t overload students’ WM during direct instruction, we should check for two Us:
Checking for Uptake: did my students hear what I said? Can they say it back to me, or paraphrase it? Can they take baby steps with the concept?
Checking for Understanding: once students have taken up a lesson, can they do something new with it? If yes, can they do something even more challenging? Can they override prior misconceptions? Can they create and analyze?
Good teaching will include both kinds of checking — but Checking for Understanding should follow Checking for Uptake.
