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 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 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 denoted by "knowing" — is not a single uniform state but a range of states that varies across two dimensions: the type of knowing (knowing-that-one, knowing-that, knowing-how, knowing-to) and the level of expertise (preconventional through postconventional). A student who has "learned" the French Revolution may have acquired knowing-that (propositional knowledge of historical facts), knowing-how (the ability to analyze primary sources), knowing-to (the disposition to consider multiple perspectives before forming a historical judgment), or all three — at different levels of expertise 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 measure a narrow subset of the range of knowing — primarily knowing-that and knowing-how at conventional levels of expertise. They are poorly designed to measure 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.