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Exploring Teaching and Learning in Luddy Indiana University

Rigor in Assessments

Posted on by akesha

Rigor is defined by the U.S. Department of Education as the cognitive complexity of a skill within a standard or of an assessment item. While the working definition of rigor contains references to the “cognitive complexity,” we can simply think of this in terms of the verbs in the standard.

Bloom Taxonomy

Bloom’s Wheel is probably the “gold standard” for helping educators craft content using appropriate verbs to help match the expected complexity.

The Cognitive Process Dimension

Citations from Anderson, L. W., & Krathwohl, D. R. (Eds.). (2001). A taxonomy for learning, teaching and assessing: A revision of Bloom’s Taxonomy of educational objectives: Complete edition, New York : Longman. Table 5.1, pages 67-68

This chart connects the cognitive domain to both action verbs (for your instructions) and student activities and deliverables:

Create To put elements together or restructure to form something new/clear functional whole

  • Generate (hypothesize)
  • Plan (design)
  • Produce (construct)
Evaluate To make judgments based on defined criteria

  • Check (coordinate, detect, monitor, test)
  • Critique (judge)
Analyze To break down information into basic parts and determine how different parts relate to each other and as a whole

  • Differentiate (discriminate, distinguish, focus, select)
  • Organize (find, cohere, integrate, outline, parse, structure)
  • Attribute (deconstruct)
Apply To use a process/procedure

  • Execute (carry out)
  • Implement (use)
Understand To construct meaning from oral, written and graphic communication

  • Interpret (clarify/paraphrase/represent/translate)
  • Exemplify (illustrate/instantiate)
  • Classify (categorize/subsume)
  • Summarize (abstract/generalize)
  • Infer (conclude/extrapolate/interpolate/predict)
  • Compare (contrast/map/match)
  • Explain (construct)
Remember To retrieve knowledge from long-term memory

  • Recognize (identify)
  • Recall (retrieve)
Webb’s Depth of Knowledge

This tool is very similar to Bloom’s Taxonomy, in that we are looking for ways to determine rigor. Even though this tool is used to measure “depth of knowledge” (DOK) it doesn’t have to be used sequentially (i.e., students must pass DOK Level 1 before being given DOK Level 2 content). Here’s a graphic outlining questions at various depths:

A chart representing Webb's Depth of Knowledge
Level 1. Recall and Reproduction: Tasks at this level require recall of facts or rote application of simple procedures. The task does not require any cognitive effort beyond remembering the right response or formula. Copying, computing, defining, and recognizing are typical Level 1 tasks.

 
Level 2. Skills and Concepts: At this level, a student must make some decisions about his or her approach. Tasks with more than one mental step, such as comparing, organizing, summarizing, predicting, and estimating, are usually Level 2.
Level 3. Strategic Thinking: At this level of complexity, students must use planning and evidence, and thinking is more abstract. A task with multiple valid responses, where students must justify their choices, would be Level 3. Examples include solving non-routine problems, designing an experiment, or analyzing characteristics of a genre.
Level 4. Extended Thinking: Level 4 tasks require the most complex cognitive effort. Students synthesize information from multiple sources, often over an extended period, or transfer knowledge from one domain to solve problems in another. Designing a survey and interpreting the results, analyzing multiple texts by to extract themes, or writing an original myth in an ancient style would all be examples of Level 4.

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