Level 2: Skills and Concepts

Level 2 includes the engagement of some mental processing beyond recalling or reproducing a response. This level generally requires students to contrast or compare people, places, events and concepts; convert information from one form to another; classify or sort items into meaningful categories ; describe or explain issues and problems, patterns , cause and effect, significance or impact, relationships, points of view or processes. A Level 2 “describe or explain” would require students to go beyond a description or explanation of recalled information to describe or explain a result or “how” or “why.” The learner should make use of information in a context different from the one in which it was learned.

Elements found in a curriculum that fall in this category involve working with or applying skills and/or concepts to tasks related to the field of study in a laboratory setting. The subject matter content at this particular level usually involves working with a set of principles, categories, heuristics, and protocols. At this level students are asked to transform/process target knowledge before responding. Example mental processes that often denote this particular level include: summarize, estimate, organize, classify, and infer.