Different Ways of Understanding Knowledge: Connectedness to Learning, teaching and assessment

Dr. Ljubica Marjanovič Umek

Summary:  By primarily considering recent views on the child’s/adolescent’s development and education, in the article the author discusses the de.nition of the term knowledge and, consequently, the understanding of knowledge in relation to its evaluation and assessment. She places the different ways of understanding knowledge in the space between older behavioural and normative development psychology theories and more recent theories that particularly highlight epistemology and metaprocesses; she also explains knowledge concepts by means of the results of empirical research pointing to certain key variables which best explain school knowledge. Afterwards, the author critically assesses various taxonomies of education targets and/or knowledge and, as she . nds, the frequently simpli.ed transposition of taxonomic levels into criteria for knowledge assessment. She also connects the understanding and assessment of knowledge with the ‘status’ and de. nition of competencies in curricula, especially with regard to the relationship between the pragmatics of competencies and fundamental or theoretical knowledge.