Learning as Process, Knowing as Product
One of the most basic distinctions in Christensen's framework is the distinction between learning as a process and knowing as its product. Learning is an activity — the activity of acquiring a prescribed range of knowing through intentional engagement with content under the guidance of a teacher. Knowing is the cognitive state of mind that results from successful learning — the state of having acquired, in a stable and accessible form, the relevant range of propositional, procedural, acquaintance, or conative knowing. (Knowing — a cognitive state of a person — is to be distinguished from knowledge, which denotes the recorded true statements located in books, journals, and databases. Only persons know; the product of learning is an extension in the student's knowing, not in their knowledge.)
This distinction is not trivial. Many educational discussions conflate the process with its product, treating "learning" as if it referred both to the activity and to the cognitive state produced by the activity. This conflation generates confusion about what learning outcomes are, how they should be assessed, and what it means to say that a student has learned something.
The Range of Knowing
The key insight of the essay is that the product of learning — the cognitive state of mind denoted by "knowing" — is not a single uniform state but a range of states that varies across three dimensions: the kind of knowing (knowing-that-one, knowing-that, knowing-how, knowing-to), the level of knowing (preconventional through postconventional), and the form of expression of the knowing (one of five forms of linguistic and/or physical expression). A student who has "learned" the French Revolution may have acquired knowing-that (propositional knowing of historical facts), knowing-how (the ability to analyse primary sources), knowing-to (the disposition to consider multiple perspectives before forming a historical judgment), or all three — at different levels and in different forms of expression in each case.
Specifying the intended range of knowing is therefore essential to the design of instruction and the evaluation of learning outcomes. An educational objective that says only "students will learn about the French Revolution" is radically underspecified: it does not indicate what kind of knowing is intended or at what level, and it therefore provides no basis for the design of instruction or assessment.
Implications for Educational Measurement
The analysis has specific implications for educational measurement. Standardized tests typically capture a narrow subset of the range of knowing — primarily knowing-that and knowing-how at conventional levels of knowing, in a restricted set of forms of expression. They are poorly designed to elicit knowing-that-one (which requires qualitative evidence of acquaintance), knowing-to (which requires evidence of dispositional responsiveness to normative situations), or postconventional knowing (which requires evidence of creative transcendence of established conventions).
This means that current educational measurement systematically underrepresents the range of educational outcomes that schools are actually trying to produce. A more complete picture of what students have learned — and therefore a more adequate basis for evaluating educational quality — would require a broader range of measurement approaches, including qualitative and performance-based methods that can capture the full range of knowing.