Students can perform well on assessments without truly understanding the material and those who understand the material might forget facts or mix them up.
The goal of the instructor is to ensure that students don't:
- make clever guesses
- regurgitate from memory what was learned
- put forth lots of hard work and enthusiasm
- produce products and performances or
- apply their natural competences well
while having little to no understanding about the content. In this context understanding is qualified by students building mental models around a course’s Big Ideas while meeting course performance goals and achieving high scores/grades while doing so.
This requires that task/goal alignment and assessment/goal alignment in addition to understanding what learners have understood in the course itself.