Assessing Knowledge, Skills, Attitudes, and Behaviors
“Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters.”
— Colossians 3:23 (NIV)
What does it mean to truly assess student learning? That question has guided this series from the beginning, and the answer, it turns out, is more expansive than a single test score or assignment grade can capture.
Across four posts, we have explored the domains that shape how MLC thinks about learning and assessment in a competency-based education model. Each domain reflects a distinct but interconnected dimension of what it means to be prepared to serve as a called worker in WELS public ministry.
Knowledge reflects what a learner knows. It is the information, mental procedures, and psychomotor procedures that form the foundation of competent practice (Marzano & Kendall, 2007). Without knowledge, there is nothing to build on.
Skills reflect what a learner can do. Skills include the mental and physical application of knowledge in authentic contexts. Skills ask not just whether a learner has encountered an idea, but whether they can think and act with it.
Attitudes reflect what a learner values and believes. Attitudes are the inward dispositions that Anderson and Krathwohl (2001) describe as developing along a continuum of internalization. For our called workers, attitudes toward faith, vocation, and the students in their care are not incidental to their preparation. They are central to it.
Behaviors reflect how a learner lives out those values in the world. Learners behave consistently and authentically in accordance with our shared faith in all of their thoughts, words, and deeds. Behaviors are the visible expression of everything that knowledge, skills, and attitudes have formed in a learner over time.
These four domains are not a hierarchy, and they are not independent of one another. Knowledge informs skill. Skill reinforces attitude. Attitude shapes behavior. And behavior, modeled faithfully in the classroom, becomes the living curriculum that students carry with them long after they have forgotten the content of any particular lesson.
Competency-based education is well-suited to assess all four domains because it asks not just what learners know, but who they are becoming as Christian educators. That is the question that animates our program and the question we hope every learner carries with them into their calling.
References
Anderson, L. W., & Krathwohl, D. R. (Eds.). (2001). A taxonomy for learning, teaching, and assessing: A revision of Bloom’s taxonomy of educational objectives. Longman.
Marzano, R. J., & Kendall, J. S. (2007). The new taxonomy of educational objectives (2nd ed.). Corwin Press.
