What makes a question worth chasing? What makes an idea worth exploring? How do these learning experiences contribute to a life worth living? These three questions, the first as posed by Angela Stockman, seek to engage a holistic approach to learning where the humanity of our students is at the center. I hope your students seek to engage you when you think about the purpose of your course. Your course exists for reasons that are not only tied to particular curriculum sequencing or a pre-determined career pathway, but also to the development of who your students are to be after the course ends.

If the content you are expected to teach represents "answers," then what questions were being asked by the people who came up with those answers? This conceptual move offers a useful strategy both for seeing a link between content standards and important questions and for coming up with ways of engaging students in the very kind of thinking that is required to truly understand the content. In short, expert knowledge is the result of inquiry, argument, and difference of opinion; the best questions point to hard-won big ideas that we want learning to come to understand. The questions thus serve as doorways or lenses through which learners can better see the key concepts, themes, theories, issues, and problems that reside within the content.

Learning outcomes and assessment frameworks guide educators in curricular decision-making, impact assessment, gap identification, and equity evaluation, aligning with anticipated learning objectives. Common frameworks include Bloom’s taxonomy, Kirkpatrick's model, Fink’s taxonomy, and Moore’s Outcomes model. The authors identified a lack of focus on learners’ impact and social justice in these frameworks and developed the Evidence of Learning and Impact Framework to address these gaps. They conducted a scoping review, creating a crosswalk between existing frameworks and identifying additional gaps. Findings from the review and crosswalk are presented, discussing the challenges of incorporating frameworks from the Global South into a more rigid structure. The review synthesizes previous knowledge and highlights the importance of multidisciplinary approaches and diverse ways of knowing.

Helping faculty think through what they value in the context of their courses is my favorite part of course design. But I have to confess that the traditional taxonomies I use when doing so have never made much conceptual sense to me. So after many years of introducing these categories with the caveat that we shouldn't think too hard about them, I finally decided to create my own. I didn't think the world needed yet another taxonomy of learning goals, but I thought I would do a better job talking with faculty if I could present the alternatives in my own vernacular. And it turns out they liked it enough to insist that I share.

When I sat down to do this, I began with a basic assumption: that teaching is many things but, at its core, it is ultimately about helping our students to develop in various ways. A focus on development makes my taxonomy a bit broader than those that emphasize learning, but that is intentional. When most of us think of the word "learning," we think of a very narrow range of activities and outcomes. But we often hope to achieve many other things when we teach, and a focus on development can give us room to be more intentional about folding those goals into our course planning. More specifically, my taxonomy helps us to think about our teaching in terms of three broad developmental goals: the development of knowledge, the development of self, and the development of experiences.

At its core, SBG is grading at the level of individual skills or topics. SBG classes include a list of standards that describe the key things that students will learn in class. These are generally discrete skills – skills that can be practiced and demonstrated separately from each other. More specifically:

A standard is a clear and observable description of an action that a student can take to demonstrate their learning of some specific topic.

For example, here is a standard from the Calculus 2 class I’m currently teaching. We’ll be learning about this next week:

D.3: I can solve separable differential equations and initial value problems.

To use DOK in your practice, start by looking at the standards (or other learning objectives) that anchor a lesson. What is the complexity of cognitive engagement required for success? When interpreting a standard, you can use the full DOK definitions for a specific content area. These general key questions can also help:

DOK 1: Is the focus on recall of facts or reproduction of taught processes?

DOK 2: Is the focus on relationships between concepts and ideas or using underlying conceptual understanding?

DOK 3: Is the focus on abstract inference or reasoning, nonroutine problem-solving, or authentic evaluative or argumentative processes that can be completed in one sitting?

DOK 4: Is the focus at least with the complexity of DOK 3, but iterative, reflective work and extended time are necessary for completion?

By superposing two widely accepted models for describing rigor--Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives and Webb's Depth-of- Knowledge (DOK) model--this article defines cognitive rigor (CR) and introduces the CR matrix for analyzing instruction and enhancing teacher lesson planning. Two large-scale collections of student work samples analyzed using the CR matrix are presented, illustrating the preponderance of curricular items aligned to each cell in the matrix.