Webb

Four Levels of Knowledge

Webb (1997) offers a cog­ni­tive approach to learn­ing, iden­ti­fy­ing four lev­els of knowl­edge:

• Recall and Repro­duc­tion - includes basic tasks that require stu­dents to recall or repro­duce knowl­edge and/or skills, work­ing with facts, terms and/or prop­er­ties of objects
• Skills and Con­cepts - con­tent at this lev­el involves work­ing with a set of prin­ci­ples and cat­e­gories
• Short-Term Strate­gic Think­ing — items falling into this cat­e­go­ry demand a short-term use of high­er order think­ing process­es, such as analy­sis and eval­u­a­tion, to solve real-world prob­lems with pre­dictable out­comes
• Extend­ed Think­ing — cur­ric­u­lar ele­ments assigned to this lev­el demand extend­ed use of high­er order think­ing process­es such as syn­the­sis, reflec­tion, assess­ment and adjust­ment of plans over time

Each Depth of Knowl­edge (DOK) is applied to each learn­ing out­come. More specif­i­cal­ly, the DOK lev­el assigned should:

• reflect the lev­el of work stu­dents are most com­mon­ly required to per­form in order for the response to be deemed accept­able
• reflect the com­plex­i­ty of the cog­ni­tive process­es demand­ed by the task out­lined by the objec­tive, rather than its dif­fi­cul­ty
• be assigned based upon the cog­ni­tive demands required by the cen­tral per­for­mance described in the objec­tive