Knowledge 

Knowledge refers to factual information. Knowledge is relatively straightforward to teach and assess and what most traditional schools focus most of their assessment on. (through quizzes, tests, multiple choice, etc.). Knowledge is continually changing and expanding – this is a challenge for schools that have to choose what knowledge children should know and learn in a restricted period of time. 

skills

Skills refer to things children are able to do. They are the essence of many disciplines – for example, scientific skills are what scientists do; musical skills are what make someone a musician. Skills have to be learned practically and need time to be practised. The good news about skills is the more you practice, the better you get at them! Skills are also transferable and tend to be more stable than knowledge – this is true for almost all school subjects. For example, although the equipment that scientists use may have changed over the past two hundred years, the skills they use remain largely the same. As children learn skills they make a progression. For the IPC, this progression is from beginning…through developing…to mastering. Note that even ‘mastering’ on a certain level is not ‘mastery’. The reason concert pianists and golfers, amongst many others, keep practising is that there isn’t a finishing point to the development of skills.
Skills can’t be assessed by tests and quizzes and are assessed through observation. We need to see a skill in action a number of times before we can begin to assess it.

understanding 

​Understanding  refers to the development or ‘grasping’ of conceptual ideas, the ‘lightbulb’ moment that we all strive for. Understanding is always developing. None of us ever ‘gets there’, so you can’t teach understanding, but what the IPC units do allow you to do is provide a whole range of different experiences through which children’s understandings can deepen.