Beyond the Bubble Test
Cultivating True Understanding Through Deep Challenge
The pursuit of academic rigour is a constant in education. But what does true rigour actually mean? For many, the term conjures images of challenging assignments, demanding workloads, and, ultimately, success on high-stakes standardised tests. The pressure to cover content to prepare students for these assessments often dictates the pace and focus of instruction. Yet, this narrow, test-score-driven view of rigour may be inadvertently sacrificing deeper, more meaningful learning.
In a thought-provoking episode of The International Classroom podcast, educational leader and author Morgan Whitfield challenges this limited perspective. She argues that true rigour extends far beyond memorisation and test preparation; it's about cultivating the capacity for deep understanding, critical thinking, and genuine engagement with complexity.
The Insufficiency of Narrow Rigour
The common understanding of rigour often boils down to increasing the degree of difficulty. Make the questions harder, assign more complex texts, increase the volume of content to be covered. While difficulty plays a role, equating it solely with rigour misses the point. As Morgan notes, this narrow focus often means,
"It doesn't necessarily mean that students are learning, that their skills are necessarily developing, but they might be getting better at taking a certain test about a very, very specific topic."
This focus on covering vast amounts of specific content, often driven by external assessments, can become a barrier to deep learning. The pressure to move quickly leaves little room for exploration, questioning, or wrestling with difficult ideas. Morgan highlights that this pressure "can actually hold teachers back," forcing them to move on before all students have truly grasped foundational concepts, leading to widening gaps in knowledge.
True rigour is not about how much content we cover, but how deeply students understand and can use the content that matters most.
True Rigour: Engaging with Powerful Knowledge
Instead of defining rigour by difficulty or coverage, Morgan suggests we define it by the nature of the knowledge students engage with and how they are able to manipulate it. She draws on Michael Young's concept of powerful knowledge, which offers a far richer framework.
Young identifies powerful knowledge as knowledge that is:
Systematic and Organised: Knowledge structured within disciplines (like science, history, or mathematics) with their own language, concepts, and ways of thinking [Young, 2008].
Allows Understanding Beyond Experience: Knowledge that enables students to understand phenomena or ideas they haven't directly encountered (e.g., understanding osmosis without seeing it happen, as Morgan offers).
Empowers Critical Engagement: Knowledge that allows students to challenge assumptions and confront complexity in the world, giving them the tools to analyse and critique the world around them.
Morgan emphasises these three aspects as being more apt when we talk about the idea of rigour. Teaching for this kind of rigour means moving beyond surface-level facts and engaging students in the systematic thinking, abstract reasoning, and critical analysis that disciplines offer.
Building Richer Schemas: The Foundation of Deep Understanding
At the heart of engaging with powerful knowledge is the construction of complex schemas. Morgan beautifully defines a schema as "little bits of knowledge that all of a sudden we start to have a clearer and clearer understanding of a larger topic or idea or concept." Think of it like building a detailed mental map, where each new piece of information connects to others, creating a rich, interconnected network of understanding.
Building robust schemas requires more than just passive reception of information. It demands active processing, making connections, retrieving knowledge, and applying it in new contexts. This is where the contrast between covering content (a mountain to climb) and exploring knowledge (an ocean with depth) becomes relevant, as Morgan suggests. Deep understanding comes from diving into the ocean's depths, exploring connections, and seeing how different pieces of knowledge fit together, rather than simply racing to the mountain's summit.
Breaking Down Silos: The Power of Interdisciplinary Connection
Real-world complexity doesn't exist in neatly separated academic silos. Climate change isn't just geography or just science; the Enigma code wasn't just mathematics or just history. Addressing complex issues and building truly robust schemas requires connecting ideas across traditional subject boundaries.
As Alex and Morgan discuss, subjects in schools are often very siloed, limiting students' ability to see the interconnectedness of knowledge. An interdisciplinary approach allows students to draw on powerful knowledge from multiple disciplines to understand a single, complex phenomenon or solve a multifaceted problem. Morgan points out the power of needing "both disciplines to really explore" topics like terraforming on Mars or historical events like the Enigma code, which require insights from science, geography, mathematics, and history.
Interdisciplinary learning isn't just an add-on; it's a vital pathway to cultivating the kind of deep understanding and ability to confront complexity that defines true rigour. It helps students build richer, more flexible schemas that are more applicable to the messy, interconnected world they inhabit.
Igniting Deep Understanding: Strategies for True Rigour
How can educators shift from a narrow, test-focused view of rigour to one that prioritises deep understanding and complexity?
Prioritise Depth Over Breadth: Be brave enough to cover less content if it means students understand that content more deeply. Tweak your curriculum to allow for sustained exploration of key concepts.
Design for Schema Building: Plan learning experiences that explicitly encourage students to connect new information to prior knowledge, organise ideas systematically, and see relationships between concepts within and across disciplines. Use knowledge retrieval practice not just for tests, but to strengthen schema connections.
Embrace Project-Based Learning and Real-World Application: Challenge students to apply their knowledge to solve authentic problems or create meaningful products. Morgan's example of drafting a UN policy document on global warming provides a concrete instance of how real-world tasks demand the application of powerful knowledge and schema building.
Integrate Student Choice and Passion: Give students agency in their learning by allowing them to explore topics of deep interest. Morgan notes that when students are passionate, they can get overwhelmed by the complexity of a topic they choose – and that's a powerful driver of genuine, rigorous inquiry.
Foster Interdisciplinary Connections: Look for opportunities to link concepts and skills across subjects. Collaborate with colleagues in other disciplines to create integrated units or projects that reflect the interconnected nature of powerful knowledge.
Assess Understanding, Not Just Recall: Develop assessment methods that require students to analyse, synthesise, evaluate, and create – demonstrating their ability to use powerful knowledge to confront complexity, not just remember facts for a test.
Moving beyond the bubble test means redefining what we value. It means prioritising the cultivation of deep understanding, the construction of rich schemas, and the capacity to engage critically with complex ideas. This is the true work of rigor – preparing students not just for the next exam, but for a world that demands critical thinking, adaptability, and the ability to navigate interconnected knowledge.
References:
Bjork, R. A., & Bjork, E. L. (1992). A framework for comparing memory models applied to the ltm strength and variety model. In L. Gleitman & R. Nairn (Eds.), Connecting theory and evidence in cognitive science: A festschrift in honor of John Anderson (pp. 1–30). Psychology Press. (Relevant for the concept of desirable difficulties, linking back to productive struggle).
Young, M. F. D. (2008). Bringing Knowledge Back In: From Social Constructivism to Social Realism in the Sociology of Education. Routledge.