#Webbs depth of knowledge chart blank how to

Paying attention to depth of understanding through DOK can help instructors know what is exactly expected of students, and how to prepare students for these high-stakes or summative assessments. Some high-stakes assessments like SBAC consider DOK in their exams and even provide teachers with the information about which DoK levels are tested on their exam blueprints. Why Care About Depth of Knowledge?ĭepth of Knowledge or DOK is important for instructors and assessment creators to consider in order to fully understand student expectations in a given assessment. As an educator, thinking about the assessment items in this manner can help distinguish exactly what student are expected to accomplish when approaching each item. Norman Webb’s Depth of Knowledge flips the focus to the cognitive aspects the students must exercise to move through an item and adequately address a question. Short of forcing longer school hours and more homework on students hoping to expand the levels, what are some ways to increase rigor? The best teachers I know incorporate classroom activities and teaching tools across the levels whether explicitly planned (using the DOK model) or, more often, incorporated intuitively to reinforce this approach and get students thinking and working at a deeper level.Typically, when we think of assessment item difficulty, we associate it with the actual question stem, the length of the questions, and other components coming from the item itself. We are continuously exploring new ways to incorporate this model into our products and our analytics and reporting functionality in order to provide teachers with deeper insight into their students’ understanding.Įducators work hard to expand their students’ knowledge and get them to think across the various levels of rigor every day. Level 4 tasks are at least as complex as level 3 tasks but require an extended time period-several weeks, perhaps, or even longer-to complete.įor more information about DOK, visit At Edmentum, we embed these levels in our assessment items in both Study Island and Edmentum Assessments. Often, Level 3 tasks have more than one valid response, and students must justify their choices. Students must use reasoning, planning, and evidence to explain their thought processes. This level gets more complex and abstract. DOK 2 tasks may involve applying a skill in a new context or explaining thinking in terms of concepts. This level requires a student to make some decisions about problem solving and procedures. These kinds of tasks do not require any cognitive effort beyond remembering the right response or formula. This level involves basic tasks that require recall of facts or rote reproduction of simple procedures. A summary of the mathematics DOK definitions is below: For all subject areas, there are four DOK levels. DOK is a language system, with definitions of each level of complexity for each subject area. It can be applied to learning expectations, instructional prompts, and assessment items alike. The depth of knowledge corresponds to the content complexity of a particular educational material. One of the critical models for understanding cognitive rigor is Norman Webb’s Depth of Knowledge (DOK) framework. Here, I would like to delve into one model that we frequently discuss at Edmentum and to attempt to give an overview of it. You can check out this article from Educational Psychology Interactive for an overview of some of the most common models. As a result, multiple models have been developed that are useful in representing what knowledge is needed to solve problems and in describing what processes exist for understanding a specific domain of knowledge. Education can be defined as the field of study focused on teaching and learning, which is a fairly broad categorization.

I have always been a fan of simple models for gaining a deeper understanding of truths that are hard to comprehend through a narrative or hard to quantify mathematically.