Bloom's stAIrcase

What is Understand?

Understand involves constructing meaning from myriad modes of instructional messages. When students understand, they can explain ideas or concepts in their own words, provide examples, and see relationships. Understanding goes beyond recalling, it involves sense-making of information and placing it into an existing schema.

In the revised Bloom's Taxonomy, Understand (called "Comprehension" in the original taxonomy) represents the first level cognitive engagement with material. While Remember involves retrieving information as learned, Understand requires students to transform information into a form that makes sense to them. This transformation is evidence that students have constructed personal meaning from the material. Understanding is foundational for all higher-order thinking. Students cannot effectively apply, analyze, evaluate, or create with knowledge they don't understand. Understand sits at the lower-order end of the cognitive spectrum, but it represents a crucial bridge between simple recall and more complex cognitive processes.

AI Literacy Connection

AI can provide explanations, examples, and multiple representations of concepts. However, AI cannot verify whether students truly understand—it can only check if their responses match expected patterns. True understanding requires human judgment and interaction.

In practice, teaching AI literacy within this dimension might look like, using AI to generate multiple explanations and examples to support understanding; students explaining concepts to AI and evaluate the AI's responses for accuracy; teaching students that AI explanations may be technically correct but do not work to aid understanding/learning; students recognizing that understanding requires personal meaning-making, not just reading AI explanations; student leveraging AI to provide immediate feedback on their original thoughts; students centering and meta-verifying their human understanding, not just accept AI-generated content; teaching students to ask AI for different representations of a single topic or explanation when they don't understand.