Checking Learning and Understanding

When should we check understanding?
when we are introducing or revising new

How can we check understanding?

Using synonyms and antonyms
Example: hot
“What’s the opposite

Asking for personal responses
Example: bear
“What would you do if you saw

Concept questions

1.Target sentence: Look! They're painting the wall

2.Target sentence: She’s a

Paraphrasing

According to Svinicki and McKeachie (McKeachie’s Teaching Tips, 14th Edition)
For example, trying to paraphrase in our own words what we are reading in a textbook is a good way to help build meaning, but it 
also helps us to identify gaps or errors in our understanding. If we try to apply our knowledge and have difficulty using it, or if we try to explain it to someone else and cannot do it, we would also know that we have some comprehension problems. Monitoring our 
comprehension is an important part of strategic learning that 
fosters self-regulation. Only if we know we have a problem in our 
understanding or a gap in our knowledge can we do something 
about it.

Cooperative learning

McKeachie explains cooperative learning as a method that builds on peer tutoring:
We have long known that in many traditional tutoring 
situations the tutor, not the student receiving the tutoring, 
benefits the most. While processing the content for presentati-on, the tutor is consolidating and integrating his or her 
content knowledge. At the same time, the tutor is also learning a 
great deal about how to learn. The tutor needs to diagnose the tutee’s learning problem, or knowledge gap, in order to help the 
tutee overcome it.

Checking understanding of instructions

Modelling the activity with one student
Asking one pair

How not to check understanding