Revisiting DOK

All teachers want their students to be challenged by rigorous, rich curriculum requiring them to grapple with complex ideas and skills. CEL 5D includes “High cognitive demand” as one of its criteria (criteria 1.4), and our own Teaching and Learning Department includes Depth of Knowledge (DOK) in its assessment of classroom observations and lesson submissions.  DOK is considered a more specific tool than its predecessor, Bloom’s Taxonomy. Remember the Three-Story Intellect?  DOK just makes it a bit more specific

Below is a refresher of the DOK levels. 

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Depth of Knowledge (DOK)

Level 1: Recall and Reproduction (only cognitive effort required is remembering right answer)

Copying, computing, defining, and recognizing are typical Level 1 tasks.

Level 2: Skills and Concepts (usually includes decision-making)

Tasks with more than one mental step such as comparing, organizing, summarizing, predicting, and estimating are usually Level 2.

Level 3: Strategic Thinking (more abstract, usually requires students to justify choices)

Tasks with multiple valid responses where students must justify their choices would be Level 3; examples include solving non-routine problems, designing an experiment, or analyzing characteristics of a genre.

Level 4: Extended Thinking (require most complex cognitive effort)

Students synthesize information from multiple sources, often over an extended period of time, or transfer knowledge from one domain to solve problems in another. Designing a survey and interpreting the results, analyzing multiple texts by to extract themes, or writing an original myth in an ancient style would all be examples of Level 4.

Note: much of today’s posts has been adapted from  https://www.edutopia.org/blog/webbs-depth-knowledge-increase-rigor-gerald-aungst and from http://www.karin-hess.com/cognitive-rigor-and-dok.

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As administrators, coaches, and T & L staff collect data in classrooms and evaluate lesson submissions, they are not looking for DOK Level 3 and 4 lessons in every classroom. We all know that it is sometimes essential for students to be able to recall and work at the skill/concept level before they can progress to deeper tasks and thinking.  We do, however, hope to see a balance of DOK levels across the district and within a classroom, with all students getting to complete some tasks at the Level Four level.  

Two important things to remember are:

• ·      Students do not necessarily need to progress through DOK levels in sequence.  Sometimes motivation is increased if students start with a Level 3 task that requires them to return to the more mundane learning required in order to accomplish that task.
•       DOK levels are not developmental.  Kindergarteners don’t live in a DOK Level 1 world. Students of all ages should be allowed to tackle tasks requiring complex thinking.

Want more? Read the blog we used as one of our sources here:  https://www.edutopia.org/blog/webbs-depth-knowledge-increase-rigor-gerald-aungst.

You can also look for next week’s blog, where we’ll have some FAQs on DOK.