Many educators are familiar with Bloom’s Taxonomy as a way to guide curriculum development and critical thinking. Webb’s work grew out of research on studying different state assessments and their alignment with their state standards. Webb’s Depth of Knowledge (DOK) provides a vocabulary and a frame of reference when thinking about our students and how they engage with the content, offering a common language to understand “rigor,” or cognitive demand, in assessments, as well as curricular units, lessons, and tasks. Webb developed four DOK levels that grow in cognitive complexity and can help teachers better align academic tasks to the career and college readiness trajectory. Webb’s four DOK levels grow in cognitive complexity and provide educators a lens on creating more cognitively engaging and challenging tasks. Educators can begin to consider these DOK levels as they revise, revisit, “upgrade” and create curriculum maps.
Webb’s Depth of Knowledge Levels (DOK)
Level |
DOK Definition |
DOK Examples |
| DOK-1 – Recall &Reproduction | Recall of a fact, term, principle, concept, or perform a routine procedure. | Recall elements and details of story; structure, such as sequence of events, character, plot and setting; Conduct basic mathematical calculations; Label locations on a map; Represent in words or diagrams a scientific concept or relationship. Perform routine procedures like measuring length or using punctuation marks correctly; Describe the features of a place or people. |
| DOK-2 – Basic Application of Skills/Concepts | Use of information, conceptual knowledge, select appropriate procedures for a task, two or more steps with decision points along the way, routine problems, organize/display data, interpret/use simple graphs. | Identify and summarize the major events in a narrative; Use context cues to identify the meaning of unfamiliar words; Solve routine multiple-step problems; Describe the cause/effect of a particular event; Identify patterns in events or behavior; Formulate a routine problem given data and conditions; Organize, represent and interpret data. |
| DOK-3 – Strategic Thinking | Requires reasoning, developing a plan or sequence of steps to approach problem; requires some decision making and justification; abstract, complex, or non-routine; often more than one possible answer. | Support ideas with details and examples; Use voice appropriate to the purpose and audience; Identify research questions and design investigations for a scientific problem; Develop a scientific model for a complex situation; Determine the author’s purpose and describe how it affects the interpretation of a reading selection; Apply a concept in other contexts. |
| DOK-4 – Extended Thinking | An investigation or application to real world; requires time to research, problem solve, and process multiple conditions of the problem or task; non-routine manipulations, across disciplines/content areas/multiple sources. | Conduct a project that requires specifying a problem, designing and conducting an experiment, analyzing its data, and reporting results/solutions; Apply mathematical model to illuminate a problem or situation; Analyze and synthesize information from multiple sources; Describe and illustrate how common themes are found across texts from different cultures; Design a mathematical model to inform and solve a practical or abstract situation. |
