Understanding Levels of Teaching

Teaching and learning can happen at different levels of complexity. These levels guide the teacher in selecting appropriate methods and the learner in achieving different types of understanding. The main levels usually discussed are Memory level, Understanding level, and Reflective level. An Autonomous development level is sometimes also mentioned as a pre-teaching or initial stage.

Memory Level of Teaching

This is the lowest level of teaching. It primarily focuses on memorization and recall of facts and information. The main objective is to enable learners to retain and reproduce the learned material. At this level, there is little emphasis on understanding the meaning or establishing relationships between concepts. Discrimination between positive and negative examples of concepts is generally not the focus here; it's more about rote learning.

Understanding Level of Teaching

This level is more thoughtful than the memory level. The goal here is to help learners grasp the meaning of concepts, understand principles, and see relationships between different ideas. Learners are expected to comprehend the information, interpret it, and apply it in different contexts. A key aspect of the understanding level is the ability to generalize, analyze, and discriminate. This is the level where learners can differentiate between what fits a concept (positive exemplar) and what does not (negative exemplar).

For example, understanding the concept of "mammal" involves not just memorizing that a whale is a mammal, but understanding the characteristics of mammals (warm-blooded, vertebrates, usually have fur/hair, feed young milk). At the understanding level, a learner can discriminate between a positive exemplar like a dog (fits characteristics) and a negative exemplar like a bird (does not fit all key characteristics, e.g., has feathers, lays eggs).

Reflective Level of Teaching

This is the highest level of teaching. It is problem-centered and requires learners to use critical thinking, reasoning, and reflection. Learners identify problems, formulate hypotheses, test them, and arrive at conclusions. This level goes beyond mere understanding; it involves applying understanding to solve new problems and develop insights. While reflective thinking builds upon understanding, the core activity is problem-solving and creative thinking, not specifically discriminating between examples of a given concept (which is foundational to understanding the concept itself).

Autonomous Development Level

This level relates more to the learner's natural capacity and ability to develop independently. It's often considered a pre-teaching level where the focus is on fostering independence, self-reliance, and creativity without much teacher intervention regarding structured concepts or discrimination exercises.

Comparing the Levels and Discrimination

Let's look at how the ability to discriminate between positive and negative examples fits into each level:

The ability to effectively distinguish between positive and negative exemplars is a core indicator of genuine understanding of a concept. If a learner can tell you what a concept is and what it is not, they have moved beyond simple memorization towards comprehension.

Therefore, the level of teaching where the learner gets a significant opportunity to discriminate at length between positive and negative exemplars of concepts is the Understanding level.

Revision Table: Teaching Levels Summary

Additional Information on Concept Learning and Discrimination

Concept learning is a fundamental process in education. A concept is a mental grouping of similar objects, events, or people. Learning a concept involves identifying the essential features or attributes that define the category.

Discrimination plays a crucial role in concept formation. Learners need to learn to differentiate between stimuli that belong to the concept (positive exemplars) and those that do not (negative exemplars). This process helps refine the definition of the concept in the learner's mind. For example, learning the concept of "fruit" involves seeing various fruits (apples, bananas, oranges - positive exemplars) and differentiating them from non-fruits (vegetables, rocks, cars - negative exemplars). Through this discrimination, the learner builds a robust understanding of what characteristics define a fruit.

Teaching strategies at the understanding level often involve presenting a range of examples and non-examples to help learners practice this discrimination and solidify their conceptual understanding.