Rigor by Design: Not Chance, Chapter 1 and DOK

Rigor by Design, Not Chance’s first chapter is called Laying the Foundations for Deeper Learning. It defines deeper learning, and the 6 classroom and teacher-oriented qualities that encourage deeper learning, including:

Mastering Core Academic Content

Thinking Critically and Solving Complex Problems

Working collaboratively on complex tasks

Communicating effectively

Learning how to learn

Developing an academic mindset  (Hess, 2023).

 

All six of these characteristics are to evolve into College and Career Readiness skills, which often require students to think critically with a combination of academic and personal life skills. This relies heavily on the development of schemas, which are cognitive frameworks that organize and interpret relevant information with automaticity (Hess, 2023).

 

Depth of Knowledge is also discussed in a light that it should not be viewed as a taxonomy, and that engaging in a higher level would thus mean it is a better level, but this is not true- Depth of Knowledge levels refer to the different depths of ways to interact with content, which simply varies by the demands of the content and the student interacting with it. All students can perform complex tasks, but some may require extra scaffolding. This all ties into the Actionable Assessment Cycle (Hess, 2023).

The actionable assessment cycle is a way of assessing students that gradually increases the complexity of tasks by introducing new contact at an appropriate pace, with increased independence, and on a continuous cycle that guides teacher instruction to enhance students DOK. I decided to research a scholarly article on Depth of Knowledge in the 4 big content areas. I have briefly discussed depth of knowledge in class before, but this one chapter alone has already gone into way more depth than what I have ever in a class discussion. It seems like DOK is a pretty big deal!

 

Depth-of-Knowledge Levels for Four Content Areas defines what DOK may look like across the curriculum. The characteristics in different content areas may look as follows:

 

Reading

Level 1: Verbatim Recall, supporting ideas with text references, identifying figurative language directly from a reading passage, using a dictionary or the Internet to define. words

Level 2: Using context clues to identify words, drawing conclusions and making predictions, summarizing major events of a reading.

Level 3: Summarizing and accessing multiple sources to address a specific topic (much like we are doing now!), analyzing and describing the characteristics of various types of literature, determining authors purpose.

Level 4: Analyzing the meaning behind multiple sources, examining and defining alternative perspectives, describing how common themes may vary from culture to culture (Webb, 2002).

Writing

Level 1: Proper use of punctuation, listing ideas and words, using proper standard grammar, simple sentences.

Level 2: Grammatically correct construction of compound sentences, writing summaries of a read or listened-to text including the main idea and other big details.

Level 3: Provide supporting details to support your big ideas, editing writing to enhance the quality.

Level 4: Write a heavy analysis comparing two texts, comparing themes, writing big ideas in a narrative format (Webb, 2002).

 

Math

Level 1: Basic recall, performing 1-step algorithms that is laid out in generic framework.

Level 2: Organizing responses, making estimations, collecting and displaying superficial data, comparing numeric data. 

Level 3: Interpreting data, drawing conclusions from sources to support data. 

Level 4: Applying mathematic principals to studies, starting from scratch with personal measurements, critiquing experiments (Webb, 2002).

 

Science

Level 1: Recall fact or terms, perform a one-step procedure (such as measuring length)

Level 2: Identify examples and non-examples of scientific ideas, select appropriate procedures based on the desired outcome, given a procedure, carry it out with routine.

Level 3: Solve abstract, non-routine problems, establish research questions and design a personal experiment.

Level 4: Complete complex, multistep experiments driven by personal data collection, interpret the results, conduct personal investigations and evaluations (Webb, 2002).

 

Between this article and the shared text, I saw constancy between the representation of depth of knowledge. Both use the four-level system of DOK to represent the complexity of thinking. The 4 levels were defined the same by both: Recall and Reproduction, Basic Skills and Concepts, Strategic Thinking and Reasoning, Extended Thinking. The content-specific examples as provided by Webb in the article aligned to these characteristics as well. 

 

Overall, reading the chapter and my chosen article tremendously helped me to understand what Rigor by Design really means. As educators, we must be intentional in our lesson planning, and know exactly what level of DOK we want our students to be at when we are assessing them. It is our job to move through the levels as we introduce new skills and concepts. The more independent students can become at the higher levels of DOK, the more rigorous they will become in being metacognitive. A higher level of DOK does not mean it is a better level, but rather a higher level of understanding with a more developed schema. All students can perform at a high depth of knowledge. It is our job to get them there with proper scaffolding and instruction.

 

References

Hess, Karin. (2023).  Rigor by Design, Not Chance: Deeper Thinking Through Actionable Instruction and Assessment. ASCD ASSN SUPERV CURR DEV, 2023. 

Webb, Norman L. (Mar. 2002). Depth-of-Knowledge Levels for Four Content Areas. www.maine.gov/doe/sites/maine.gov.doe/files/inline-files/dok.pdf.