As a teacher plans a reading unit for her upcoming class, she decides to increase the rigor of her planned lesson activities. Since the text she chose contains many unfamiliar words, students are tasked with reading a passage, listing the unfamiliar words, and defining them using their dictionaries. She decides that instead of requiring students to choose five words to define, she will require students to define ten words this time.
Does this set off any alarm bells for you? It should. While requiring students to define 10 words rather than 5 may be deemed more work, more difficult, or more troublesome by students, it is not necessarily any more complex. Students are still asked to complete the same type of task, so it is not necessarily more rigorous. Sometimes, providing more work to your students is important for them to master basic skills. But, if you are ready for your students to approach a topic with more complexity, adding more work isn’t the way to do it.
Let’s consider a different choice. Instead, this teacher decides that students can practice utilizing context clues to help them define unknown words. She previously taught her students how to identify context clues in texts, and now she feels that students can begin applying that knowledge within texts. She asks students to apply the context-clue rules to two unfamiliar words in the text, then write a rationale explaining why they believe they have correctly defined each word.
This task seems more complex, right? Students do not just define words. They have to apply the skills they have learned to analyze clues that help them determine the meanings. In this case, we can be fairly confident that this second scenario’s task is more rigorous than the first.
What Rigor Means
The word “rigor” is hard to avoid in education these days. We hear it all the time. “Our lessons need to be more rigorous…We need to increase the rigor of our assessments…Our classroom isn’t rigorous enough.” It is a term often used but still misunderstood by many educators.
Some think that having a rigorous classroom means making the work harder. Others believe it is characterized by requiring students to do more than they currently do, perhaps by increasing the number of assignments or adding more concepts within a lesson. Some individuals may believe it means teaching content from a higher grade level to lower-grade students. Others have argued that teaching content more quickly in less time makes for rigorous lessons.
Rigor is actually the result of work that challenges students’ thinking in new and interesting ways. The content we teach and the amount of work accomplished within a given activity do not define it. In education, rigor is understood as activities and tasks that are complex and challenging, where the work promotes critical thinking and the application of content. Rigor is about helping students learn at higher cognitive levels, and it is teaching with the understanding that all students can learn and meet the lesson goals. It is about supporting each learner so that they can achieve at high levels, and it promotes students’ critical thinking skills.
Rigor comes from what students actually do with content and should be measured in depth of understanding rather than in how much extra work a student may complete. A task that is rigorous for one student may sit below the reach of another, which is one more reason to define rigor by thinking about the task’s demands on individual students, rather than how “much work” or how “hard” a task is.
Why a Shared Definition Matters
The definition of rigor on its own can be nebulous and open to interpretation unless there is a specific lens through which to analyze lessons for rigor. The lens we can will use in this article is Webb’s Depth of Knowledge, or Webb’s DOK (https://www.edutopia.org/article/how-use-norman-webb-depth-of-knowledge/).
In order to successfully implement the concept of rigor into the classroom, there must be a standardized way of defining rigor and applying it to the concepts you must teach within your class. Understanding and using Webb’s Depth of Knowledge is a specific, accurate, and useful way to define your lessons’ rigor and design activities to meet your lesson goals.
While this idea may seem intuitive to you, educational research indicates that actual classroom instruction and activities typically fall at a lower level of rigor than many standards dictate (https://tntp.org/publication/the-opportunity-myth/). A clear method for analyzing a standard and designing appropriately rigorous activities is critical to ensuring that every classroom activity provides students with appropriate complexity.
Webb’s Depth of Knowledge: A Lens for Rigor
Webb’s Depth of Knowledge is a framework for categorizing tasks aligned with standards and lesson objectives by the complexity of thinking required to complete them successfully. Norman Webb developed the model so that educators can categorize tasks according to their level of complexity or the depth of understanding required to complete the task.
Every standard or lesson objective that you teach can be aligned to a level of Webb’s DOK. Your goal is to clearly understand how your lessons align with each level and plan for appropriate activities that match your lesson goals. Webb’s Depth of Knowledge contains four levels: Recall and Reproduction, Skills and Concepts, Strategic Thinking, and Extended Thinking. The levels move from lower rigor to higher rigor, and each is described next.
Level 1: Recall and Reproduction
Tasks at this level ask students to recall or reproduce knowledge and skills. Assignments are the most straightforward and are designed to ensure students have the background knowledge and foundational skills necessary to work on more complex tasks in the future. Tasks usually involve working with facts, vocabulary, specific details, simple calculations and operations, known principles, or specific descriptions of well-understood concepts. The student does very little processing and interpretation of information, so tasks at this level are usually not considered rigorous. A student answering a Level 1 item will typically either know the answer or not, since the answer does not need to be figured out or solved in any way. Although Level 1 tasks are considered low-rigor, they are still critical components of a well-rounded education and are often the skills students apply at higher rigor levels in other activities. Common verbs associated with standards at this level include remember, memorize, restate, recognize, demonstrate, illustrate, define, recall, label, identify, and draw. Sample tasks include making a timeline, listing keywords for a topic, matching definitions, highlighting key information, labeling a diagram, completing a multiple-choice quiz, completing simple math operations, retelling a story, and using a dictionary to find word meanings.
Level 2: Skills and Concepts
This level includes mental processes that go beyond recalling, reproducing, or locating an answer. Tasks at this level ask students to use their background knowledge to solve problems or understand situations. Here, students start applying some skills to the content, and they need to process the facts, formulas, or ideas before responding to a task. More than one mental step is involved, and a student must make some decisions about their approach. Tasks at this level are considered more rigorous because they go beyond mere recall of information, requiring deeper application of knowledge.
Common verbs include solve problems, explain, construct, connect, create, apply, research, infer, summarize, categorize, distinguish, graph, modify, and interpret. Sample tasks include constructing a model, making a map, table, or graph from provided data, explaining an article’s ideas, applying rules to solve a problem, connecting concepts by explaining relationships, summarizing a major theme or event, drawing a diagram to show a process, and explaining a series of steps used to find a solution.
Level 3: Strategic Thinking
Tasks at this level require the use of planning, reasoning, and higher-order thinking processes, such as analysis and evaluation, to solve real-world problems or explore questions with multiple possible outcomes. These assignments require an in-depth integration of conceptual knowledge and multiple skills to reach a solution or produce a final product. Here, processing and applying information goes beyond summarizing to analyzing ideas, explaining thoughts with reasoning, and supporting conclusions drawn from specific evidence. These tasks focus on an in-depth understanding of a text, data set, or source. They do not yet synthesize ideas or combine multiple concepts into new solutions, which comes with Level 4.
Common verbs include discuss, debate, classify, examine, decide, test, compare, explain, assess, hypothesize, investigate, and critique. Sample tasks include preparing and conducting a debate, classifying character actions in a novel, comparing how two topics are the same or different, explaining why certain information is important or valid, identifying research questions and designing an investigation to test a hypothesis, constructing a list of criteria for an evaluation, and analyzing the results of a survey.
Level 4: Extended Thinking
This level demands extended and integrated use of higher-order thinking processes, such as critical and creative-productive thinking, reflection, and adjustment of plans over a period of time. Problems are often based on real-world situations and require students to collect information, implement their solutions, and then refine those solutions for maximum effectiveness. The goal is for students to develop more efficient and effective practices using their gathered data. These activities often require long-term strategies to collect information, design a solution, and monitor the success of those solutions. One caution applies here. Extended time alone does not make a task a Level 4. You must also look at the level of thinking required by the student to complete the task.
Common verbs include design, propose, assess, reflect, modify, plan, create, analyze, prove, and connect. Sample tasks include designing and completing a research project, proposing a solution to a real-world problem, assessing the success of a solution and modifying it to improve it, writing a persuasive argument that contains a call to action, applying information from more than one discipline to solve a real-world problem, and drawing evidence from multiple sources to support conclusions.
A guide that summarizes each level with associated verbs and tasks can be found here: https://modelteaching.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Webbs-Depth-of-Knowledge-Guide.pdf
Rigor Comes From the Task, Not the Verb
Each standard is written in a way that contains one or more verbs, followed by a description of a task or idea that students must learn. We can take the verb as a starting point to better understand the context of the standard. However, the verb alone does not indicate the rigor level (https://www.ascd.org/blogs/what-exactly-is-depth-of-knowledge-hint-its-not-a-wheel). Let’s analyze two different classroom objectives that were built from a standard to learn why:
Let’s say you have two different objectives you built from a particular standard.
- Create a timeline containing the five important events of World War I that we discussed in class.
- Create a potential alternative timeline for the events of World War I when presented with one change to the cause of the war.
Both standards use the verb “create,” and you might see that “create” is listed as an example verb associated with DOK Level 4. It appears there because Level 4 focuses on extended thinking, typically on activities that involve creating new ideas. However, it is the second objective that is much more closely aligned with Level 4, because the student must deeply understand the causes and effects of certain events in World War I and justify an alternative timeline if a key characteristic of the war were changed. The first objective does not provide that same context to the verb “create.” In the first objective, students are simply constructing a timeline where they recall the events and dates they learned in class and arrange them in order. In the case of the first objective, even though the verb “create” appears there, the context does not point to a Level 4 task, and most likely falls further down at Level 1 or 2.
Follow these steps when assigning the right DOK level based on your analysis of a standard or objective.
- First, look at the main verb in the standard/ objective
- Next, look at what comes after the main verb to determine the verb’s connotation and the context to which it is applied. What tasks would be required to demonstrate the correct level of depth and understanding of the concept, and the rigor required for the content?
- Finally, consider how the learner must interact with the content through those tasks to determine the DOK level. What activities might be necessary? What questions might you ask?
Matching the DOK Level to Standards and Objectives
In general, a standard is a state, district, or school expectation for student learning. An objective is a lesson goal, aligned to the standard, that is specific to a given day’s lesson. While a standard speaks to a general goal for a concept, an objective lists the behavior, condition, and criteria for how students will interact with the day’s lesson (https://www.solutiontree.com/blog/d-o-k-part-2-how-to-align-standards-activities-assessments-and-ai/).
Let’s say that a standard for your curriculum is to:
utilize scaled bar graphs to represent a data set with several categories.
An objective specific to one lesson and aligned to this standard might be that:
in pairs, students will generate a graph of the frequency of colors found in a pack of candy with 100 percent accuracy.
The objective is specific to the day’s lesson goals, and it still aligns to the curriculum standard. Similarly, if you design an assessment that addresses the objective, an appropriate task might be for:
students to take another set of categories, such as the different types of flowers found in the school garden, and complete a bar graph to be turned in for a grade.
These assessments and tasks are likely at Level 2, Skills and Concepts, because students are applying knowledge of graphs in a structured way. Notice how the assessment is aligned with the objective, which aligns with the standard.
Let’s take this scenario further. What if you had an accelerated group of students that you felt needed to be challenged? Providing more bar graph examples would not necessarily challenge them. It would just provide more work. Instead, you might require students to critique a set of bar graphs and draw conclusions about the relationships between the categories presented. This task might align best at a DOK Level 3, and you have effectively increased the rigor of the activity for the group of students that needed the challenge.
As you design your lessons, consider how you might modify the work product, the learning process, or the content itself to support students who need assistance while still meeting or exceeding the rigor requirements of your standard. Your students can and should always interact with standards at the rigor level set by the standard, or beyond (https://www.edutopia.org/article/simple-tool-aligning-instruction-and-assessment/).
Rigor in the Age of AI
With AI used to generate lesson ideas, differentiate lessons, build assessments, and improve teacher planning, building rigorous lessons can now be aided by the many AI tools on the market today. What’s important as teachers is that we understand the fundamentals of building rigorous lessons and activities before utilizing AI. But chatbots like Claude or ChatGPT, when correctly prompted, can help you cut down on time to build rigorous activities and assessments, and can be applied in the classroom after your expertise and scrutiny. Other AI-focused tools have been created to explicitly provide support to teachers planning for rigorous activities or generating strong questions to aid in classroom learning (https://teachquill.com/dok-question-generator) . In the past, drafting a set of tasks that supported higher levels of rigor likely took significant planning time. Now you can give an AI tool your standard and its Webb’s DOK level, then ask it to generate tasks that match that level rather than tasks that simply add more work (https://www.briskteaching.com/ai-tools/depth-of-knowledge-questions-generator). For example, you can ask for a Level 1 warm-up to check foundational knowledge, a Level 2 activity that applies a skill in a structured way, or a Level 3 prompt that asks students to analyze evidence and justify a conclusion, all aligned to your same classroom objective. AI can also work in the other direction. You can paste an existing worksheet and ask it to identify the DOK level of each item, which helps you see when a lesson may be inappropriately presented at a low-rigor recall. Used this way, AI can become a planning partner that helps you both design and evaluate for rigor, while you retain professional judgment about which tasks fit your students, how to sequence them, and where deeper thinking should happen in your classroom.
Keep in mind, though, that without your level of scrutiny after an AI tool produces the work, you can easily slip and ignore rigor. Studies already point to an overuse of chatbots causing a decrease in cognition, so while you can still utilize AI mindfully and professionally to support your expertise, it is not a cure-all for improving lesson design!
