Assessing ‘knowing’, ‘understanding’, and ‘doing’: Teacher evaluations

Koole, Tom

doi:10.1075/pbns.225.03koo

In:Evaluating Cognitive Competences in Interaction
Edited by Gitte Rasmussen, Catherine E. Brouwer and Dennis Day
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 225] 2012
► pp. 43–66

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Teacher evaluations

Assessing ‘knowing’, ‘understanding’, and ‘doing’

Tom Koole | Utrecht University

Published online: 21 November 2012

https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.225.03koo

It is well established that teachers perform evaluations or assessments of student answers. This chapter shows that participants orient to three different dimensions of evaluations: the positive/negative dimension, the object dimension of what is being assessed, and the dimension of the value according to which the object is assessed. The paper then focuses on the object dimension of teacher evaluations in a data set of dyadic teacher-student explanations in mathematics classrooms. The vast majority of teacher evaluations is either concerned with students’ ‘knowing’, or with students’ ‘doing’ – for example when the teacher treats a wrong answer as a mistake -, not with students’ ‘understanding’. The chapter shows both the sequential characteristics of these differently oriented evaluations, and their turn formats.

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