What This Skill Does

This skill authors or reviews Know/Understand/Do (KUD) charts for learning targets in competency-based developmental band frameworks. A KUD chart is a planning and teaching tool — not an assessment structure — that specifies what students need to factually hold (Know), what transferable conceptual insight they should develop (Understand), and what they will produce, perform, or demonstrate as evidence of capability (Do). The skill handles seven distinct starting points, from a raw government curriculum document to an existing KUD chart needing quality improvement, and routes to upstream skills when better-prepared inputs would produce stronger output.

The skill enforces two critical distinctions that are commonly collapsed in practice. First, the Know and Understand layers are teaching context, not additional assessment instruments. A student is assessed against the Do layer; the K and U layers inform how learning is designed and sequenced. This means a single learning target can have an analytically rich Understand layer without becoming a compound LT requiring a split. Second, Do cells are typed as either performance (student produces or executes a discrete evaluable artefact — essay, presentation, seminar contribution, lab report) or disposition (student demonstrates a behavioural pattern across time and contexts that cannot be adequately evidenced in a single occasion). Most T1 and T2 LTs have performance Dos assessed by rubric. Most T3 LTs have dispositional Dos assessed through multi-informant observation. The skill makes this distinction explicit in every Do cell.

The skill also types prerequisite relationships — distinguishing hard prerequisites (logically impossible to proceed without; warrants a readiness check) from soft enablers (enriches and accelerates but does not gate assessment) from conceptual accelerators (makes a competency portable and transferable to novel contexts). Most knowledge-to-disposition relationships are soft enablers, not hard gates. Over-gating — treating enrichment relationships as hard prerequisites — causes teachers to delay dispositional work unnecessarily.

Evidence Foundation

Wiggins & McTighe (2005, 2011) — Understanding by Design establishes KUD as the unit-level planning architecture through which curriculum intent becomes teachable. The critical UbD insight operationalised here is that Know, Understand, and Do are qualitatively different things requiring different instructional and assessment approaches. An Understand is not a fact to reproduce; it is a transferable idea a student carries into new situations. A Do is not a topic to cover; it is an observable demonstration of capability.

Black & Wiliam (1998) — Inside the Black Box establishes the theoretical basis for treating the K and U layers as teaching infrastructure rather than assessment targets. Formative assessment operates on the gap between current and desired performance (Do), informed by what students need to hold (Know) and grasp (Understand). Conflating the teaching layer with the assessment layer produces rubrics that assess the wrong thing.

Anderson & Krathwohl (2001) — The revised Bloom's taxonomy provides the cognitive science basis for the Know/Understand distinction. Know maps to remembering (retrieving relevant knowledge from long-term memory); Understand maps to understanding (constructing meaning from instructional messages). These are genuinely different cognitive operations requiring different instructional approaches and different assessment instruments.

Bandura (1997) — Self-Efficacy: The Exercise of Control provides the theoretical basis for the performance vs disposition distinction in Do cells. Dispositional capabilities — self-regulation, empathy, metacognitive self-direction — develop through repeated enactment across contexts over extended periods. They are not demonstrated in a single performance occasion. Assessment of dispositions requires accumulated evidence from multiple informants across time, not a rubric applied to a single task.

Heritage (2008) — Learning Progressions reinforces that developmental progressions must describe what learners can do with content across bands, not just harder content. Progression levers (independence, complexity, scope, precision, reasoning, transfer) are the mechanism by which this skill ensures band-to-band transitions are genuinely developmental rather than merely topical.