Procedural Questions Convergent Questions

b. Understand

Students are said understand when they are able to construct meaning from instructional languages, including oral written, and graphic communications. Besides, students understand when they build connections between the new knowledge to be gained and their prior knowledge Anderson et al, 2001. p.70. In this category, there are six cognitive processes like interpreting, exemplifying, classifying, summarizing, inferring, and comparing. Interpreting occurs when a student is able to convert information from one representational form to another. It may involve converting words to words, pictures to words, words to pictures, numbers to words, words to numbers, and the like. Translating, paraphrasing, representing, and clarifying are alternative terms for interpreting Anderson et al, 2001. p.70. Exemplifying according to Anderson, et al. 2001 occurs when a student gives a specific example or an instance of a general concept or principle and it involves identifying the defining features of the general concept or principle. For instance, a teacher gives four kind of texts only one of which is a descriptive text and asks students to name the text that is descriptive. The third cognitive process is classifying. It begins with a specific instance and requires the students to find a general concept or principle. Classifying involves detecting relevant features that “fit” both the specific instance and the concept Anderson et al, 2001. p.72. The situation of this process is like a teacher displays a video of conversation and then indicates the greeting. Next level is summarizing. Anderson et al. 2001 state that it happens when a student suggests a single statement that represents presented information a general theme. Alternative terms of summarizing are generalizing and abstracting. The fifth is inferring. It occurs when a student is able to abstract a concept or principle that accounts for a set example by encoding the relevant features of each instance. Mayer 2002 says that inferring involves drawing a logical conclusion from presented information. For instance, when learning Spanish as a second language, the objective may be “Students will be able to infer grammatical principles from examples.” Then, to assess the objective, students are given article noun pairs “la casa, el muchacho, la senorita, el pero.” What they need to do is formulating a principle when to use the article la and el p.229 Comparing usually involves making comparisons among instances within the context of the entire set Anderson et al. 2001. Furthermore, they say that detecting things such as similarities and differences between two or more objects are the part of comparing the cognitive process. The alternative terms for this cognitive process are contrasted, mapping, or matching. According to Anderson et al. 2001, explaining cognitive process happens when a student is able to construct and use a cause-and-effect model of a system. Reeves 2011 adds when people understand, they are able to express information or concepts in their own words or explain a meaning of something to a new situation and idea p.202.

c. Apply

In applying, it contains procedures to perform exercises or solve problems Anderson et al, 2001. Therefore, this level has a correlation with procedural