Depth of Knowledge

Teachers are outsourcing the design of rigorous questions to AI tools, and the questions they get back are often misclassified, generic, and disconnected from the actual lesson. This handbook gives teachers back the cognitive skill of designing those questions themselves.

Depth of Knowledge: A Practical Guide to Designing Rigorous Questions Without AI restores to educators the craft of writing cognitively demanding questions from lesson content alone, without relying on artificial intelligence tools. It uses Norman L. Webb's Depth of Knowledge (DOK) framework as its spine, returns to Webb's own 1997 and 2002 monographs as primary sources, and corrects the widespread misinterpretation of DOK perpetuated by the unauthorized "DOK Wheel" graphic.

The handbook's core contribution is a five-step, content-first, verb-agnostic protocol that takes any lesson from any subject and any grade level and produces four questions (one at each DOK level) designed from the lesson's own content rather than from a generic stem or a tool's output. The method is verified by reverse-coding, the most reliable test for confirming a question's actual cognitive demand.

The handbook is distinctive in three respects. First, it is faithful to Webb's primary sources rather than to the secondary literature that has distorted them. Second, it provides a practical method that works across subjects, with worked examples in science, philosophy, mathematics, history, English, Arabic, and Islamic Education. Third, it situates the framework within a longer and broader intellectual history: a substantial chapter traces the principle that "recall is not reasoning" through the Islamic intellectual tradition, from Al-Hasan al-Basri in the eighth century to Ibn Khaldun's four-level progression in the Muqaddimah (1377) to contemporary thinkers. This genealogy establishes that the underlying principle is neither uniquely Western nor exclusively modern, and positions the handbook for international use and a planned Arabic edition.