How can we know about another’s understanding?

One area of educational research is in exploring how people (such as students) understand particular topics.

Someone setting out on research in this area would need to consider issues of  ontology: What is the nature of the ‘understanding’ (and/or related notions such as ‘ideas’, ‘thinking’, ‘personal knowledge’, ‘conceptions’...)? This would likely suggest that understanding is a complex entity, composed of many components of different kinds and that each individual develops a (somewhat) idiosyncratic understanding of the world). This perspective supports a research question of the kind ‘HOW does this person understand the topic/concept...?’

Given the complexity of understanding, and the difficulties inherent in exploring other’s mental phenomena (see Taber, K. S. (2013). Modelling Learners and Learning in Science Education: Developing representations of concepts, conceptual structure and conceptual change to inform teaching and research. Dordrecht: Springer) we might conclude that research needs to be idiographic in nature (expecting individual differences) and interpretivist (as the researcher needs to form interpretations of the representations research participants offer of their own understanding of a topic - see Taber, 2013).

Ethnographic leanings?

The researcher entering this area of work has to try not to allow their own understanding to colour how they interpret their participant's reports of their thinking. It has been suggested it can be useful to consider the participants mental experience to be like an alien world, and to adopt an ethnographic stance to studying the ‘other’

"The guiding plan for research in this [ethnographic] tradition is to ask children to explain their ideas and then to listen carefully to their words in the verstehen tradition. It aims to be entirely value-free, as an anthropologist might try to be while examining the culture of an alien tribe. Probably the early work of Jean Piaget (1929), where he records young children's ideas about an animistic nature and a curiously moving 'watching' moon [clinical interviews], first inspired this sort of exploration’ (Solomon, 1993: 1-2)

Solomon, J. (1993). Four frames for a field. In P. J. Black & A. M. Lucas (Eds.), Children’s Informal Ideas in Science (pp. 1-19). London: Routledge.

Can we ‘measure’ understanding?

Some research in education sets out to measure learners’ knowledge and/or understanding of some topic. This suggests a more positivistic stance, assuming that it is possible to quantify a person’s understanding on some scale. (This is of course what school and college tests and assessment are assumed to do, and these are widely used in teaching.) This approach assumes it is possible to set out a canonical representation of target knowledge and then rate students against it to profile understanding in a sample of a population - a more nomothetic approach. This perspective could address a research question of the kind ‘how WELL do learners understand the topic/concept...?’

We might think that this is question is really ‘to what extent does a person’s understanding match the canonical model of target understanding’. This can be seen as addressing a very limited aspect of the complexity of someone’s understanding and so offers a much impoverished question compared with the exploratory question  ‘HOW does this person understand the topic/concept...?’

However, clearly both questions may be valid foci for educational research. What is important is that the researcher is quite clear about the purposes of their own particular research, and so employs appropriate methods and reports.

For an example of the confusion possible when different researchers adopt a different ontology, and so make different epistemological assumptions (and so not surprisingly come of different conclusions in their studies) in this area of research see the discussion of Identifying alternative conceptual frameworks of ‘force’ in Classroom-based Research and Evidence-based Practice: An introduction (2nd ed.) (pp.61-66

Taber, K. S. (2013). Classroom-based Research and Evidence-based Practice: An introduction (2nd ed.). London: Sage.

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