KUD Knowledge Type Mapper

What This Skill Does

Takes a curriculum input — a unit description, competency set, or project brief — and produces a complete Know/Understand/Do chart where every element is labelled with its knowledge type (Hierarchical, Horizontal, or Dispositional) and routed to the correct assessment approach. This is the operational bridge between the Curriculum Knowledge Architecture Designer (which diagnoses what types of knowledge are present) and the assessment skills that build the actual instruments: Coherent Rubric Logic Builder for skills, Dispositional Knowledge Assessment Designer for dispositions. Most KUD charts treat all three columns as equivalent. They are not. A Hierarchical Know element (facts with right/wrong answers) and a Horizontal Know element (contested conceptual knowledge) require fundamentally different assessment — the first can be auto-assessed, the second requires interpretive judgment. A Do that is a skill (assessed by rubric against criteria on a specific task) and a Do that is a disposition (assessed through multi-informant observation over time) cannot be assessed the same way — and routing a disposition to a rubric actively undermines it. This skill makes those distinctions explicit so that every element in the KUD chart has a clear, defensible assessment pathway before teaching begins. AI is specifically valuable here because producing a knowledge-typed KUD chart requires simultaneously applying curriculum epistemology (Bernstein's knowledge structures), assessment design logic (Wiliam's assessability constraints), learning science (Hattie's surface/deep/transfer distinction), and motivation theory (Deci & Ryan's autonomy conditions) — a combination that is rare in any single educator and that most planning processes skip entirely.

Evidence Foundation

Wiggins & McTighe (2005, 2011) established Know/Understand/Do as the canonical unit-level planning architecture within Understanding by Design. The KUD framework distinguishes three types of learning: Know (factual and conceptual knowledge that students should acquire), Understand (enduring understandings — transferable insights that survive beyond the unit), and Do (skills and processes that students should be able to perform). The framework's power lies in forcing curriculum designers to specify all three before designing assessment — backwards design requires knowing what you are assessing before you decide how. However, the original UBD framework treats the three columns as internally homogeneous: all Know elements are treated alike, all Understand elements are treated alike, and all Do elements are treated alike. This is the gap the present skill addresses.

Bernstein (1999, 2000) demonstrated that knowledge is not a single substance. Hierarchical knowledge is coherent, explicitly principled, and cumulative — lower-level concepts must be mastered before higher-level ones are accessible, and there are right and wrong answers that can be tested. Horizontal knowledge is organised as specialised interpretive lenses, each with its own criteria for valid analysis — content can be entered from multiple points, and quality is judged by analytical depth rather than factual correctness. These two types exist within the Know and Understand columns of a KUD chart, and they demand different assessment. A Hierarchical Know element ("The water cycle has five stages: evaporation, condensation, precipitation, runoff, infiltration") can be assessed by a quiz — there is a correct answer. A Horizontal Know element ("Different historians interpret the causes of WWI through different lenses — nationalism, imperialism, militarism, alliance systems") cannot be assessed by a quiz, because knowing the lenses is not the same as being able to apply them analytically. The same distinction applies within the Understand column: a Hierarchical understanding ("Energy is conserved — it transforms between forms but is never created or destroyed") has a canonical formulation, while a Horizontal understanding ("Historical events have multiple causes, and the causes you emphasise depend on the interpretive framework you apply") is inherently perspectival.

Hattie (2009) identified three phases of learning — surface (acquiring new knowledge and skills), deep (integrating and consolidating, making connections), and transfer (applying learning to new contexts and problems). Each phase requires different teaching and different assessment. Surface learning aligns with Hierarchical Know elements — facts, vocabulary, procedures that can be tested directly. Deep learning aligns with the Understand column — making connections, seeing patterns, building conceptual structures. Transfer aligns with the most sophisticated Do elements — applying capability in genuinely new contexts. Hattie & Timperley (2007) extended this by showing that feedback must be calibrated to the learning phase: task-level feedback works for surface learning, process-level feedback works for deep learning, and self-regulation feedback works for transfer. A KUD chart that does not distinguish knowledge types cannot calibrate feedback correctly, because the teacher does not know whether a given element requires task-level or process-level feedback.

Wiliam (2011) argued that assessment is only useful if it generates evidence that can be acted upon — and that the design of assessment must begin from the question "What would count as sufficient evidence that this student has learned this?" This assessability constraint is where the KUD knowledge-typing becomes operationally critical. Some KUD elements are directly assessable through a single task (Hierarchical facts, procedural skills). Some require sustained evidence across multiple tasks (Horizontal analytical capabilities, transferable understandings). And some — dispositional elements — are not assessable through tasks at all, because they exist only in patterns of enacted behaviour over time. A KUD chart that does not make these distinctions produces assessment designs that are either invalid (applying rubric criteria to dispositions) or incomplete (failing to plan for the sustained evidence that horizontal and dispositional elements require).

Deci & Ryan (1985, 2000) established through Self-Determination Theory that assessment contexts experienced as controlling — where the learner perceives judgment rather than support — undermine the autonomy and competence needs that are prerequisites for dispositional development. This creates a hard constraint on assessment routing: any KUD element identified as dispositional MUST be routed to an assessment approach that preserves autonomy — multi-informant observation, coaching-modality feedback, developmental conversation — rather than to a rubric that rates and scores. Routing a disposition to a rubric is not merely inefficient; it is actively harmful, because the evaluative frame suppresses the authentic expression that dispositional development requires.

Input Schema