critical thinking and other higher order thinking skills

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• Critical Thinking and other Higher-Order Thinking Skills

Critical thinking is a higher-order thinking skill. Higher-order thinking skills go beyond basic observation of facts and memorization. They are what we are talking about when we want our students to be evaluative, creative and innovative.

When most people think of critical thinking, they think that their words (or the words of others) are supposed to get “criticized” and torn apart in argument, when in fact all it means is that they are criteria-based. These criteria require that we distinguish fact from fiction; synthesize and evaluate information; and clearly communicate, solve problems and discover truths.

Why is Critical Thinking important in teaching?

According to Paul and Elder (2007), “Much of our thinking, left to itself, is biased, distorted, partial, uninformed or down-right prejudiced.  Yet the quality of our life and that of which we produce, make, or build depends precisely on the quality of our thought.”  Critical thinking is therefore the foundation of a strong education.

Using Bloom’s Taxonomy of thinking skills, the goal is to move students from lower- to higher-order thinking:

• from knowledge (information gathering) to comprehension (confirming)
• from application (making use of knowledge) to analysis (taking information apart)
• from evaluation (judging the outcome) to synthesis (putting information together) and creative generation

This provides students with the skills and motivation to become innovative producers of goods, services, and ideas.  This does not have to be a linear process but can move back and forth, and skip steps.

How do I incorporate critical thinking into my course?

The place to begin, and most obvious space to embed critical thinking in a syllabus, is with student-learning objectives/outcomes.  A well-designed course aligns everything else—all the activities, assignments, and assessments—with those core learning outcomes.

Learning outcomes contain an action (verb) and an object (noun), and often start with, “Student’s will....” Bloom’s taxonomy can help you to choose appropriate verbs to clearly state what you want students to exit the course doing, and at what level.

• Students will define the principle components of the water cycle. (This is an example of a lower-order thinking skill.)
• Students will evaluate how increased/decreased global temperatures will affect the components of the water cycle. (This is an example of a higher-order thinking skill.)

Both of the above examples are about the water cycle and both require the foundational knowledge that form the “facts” of what makes up the water cycle, but the second objective goes beyond facts to an actual understanding, application and evaluation of the water cycle.

Using a tool such as Bloom’s Taxonomy to set learning outcomes helps to prevent vague, non-evaluative expectations. It forces us to think about what we mean when we say, “Students will learn…”  What is learning; how do we know they are learning?

The Best Resources For Helping Teachers Use Bloom’s Taxonomy In The Classroom by Larry Ferlazzo

Consider designing class activities, assignments, and assessments—as well as student-learning outcomes—using Bloom’s Taxonomy as a guide.

The Socratic style of questioning encourages critical thinking.  Socratic questioning  “is systematic method of disciplined questioning that can be used to explore complex ideas, to get to the truth of things, to open up issues and problems, to uncover assumptions, to analyze concepts, to distinguish what we know from what we don’t know, and to follow out logical implications of thought” (Paul and Elder 2007).

Socratic questioning is most frequently employed in the form of scheduled discussions about assigned material, but it can be used on a daily basis by incorporating the questioning process into your daily interactions with students.

In teaching, Paul and Elder (2007) give at least two fundamental purposes to Socratic questioning:

• To deeply explore student thinking, helping students begin to distinguish what they do and do not know or understand, and to develop intellectual humility in the process
• To foster students’ abilities to ask probing questions, helping students acquire the powerful tools of dialog, so that they can use these tools in everyday life (in questioning themselves and others)

How do I assess the development of critical thinking in my students?

If the course is carefully designed around student-learning outcomes, and some of those outcomes have a strong critical-thinking component, then final assessment of your students’ success at achieving the outcomes will be evidence of their ability to think critically.  Thus, a multiple-choice exam might suffice to assess lower-order levels of “knowing,” while a project or demonstration might be required to evaluate synthesis of knowledge or creation of new understanding.

Critical thinking is not an “add on,” but an integral part of a course.

• Make critical thinking deliberate and intentional in your courses—have it in mind as you design or redesign all facets of the course
• Many students are unfamiliar with this approach and are more comfortable with a simple quest for correct answers, so take some class time to talk with students about the need to think critically and creatively in your course; identify what critical thinking entail, what it looks like, and how it will be assessed.

Additional Resources

• Barell, John. Teaching for Thoughtfulness: Classroom Strategies to Enhance Intellectual Development . Longman, 1991.
• Brookfield, Stephen D. Teaching for Critical Thinking: Tools and Techniques to Help Students Question Their Assumptions . Jossey-Bass, 2012.
• Elder, Linda and Richard Paul. 30 Days to Better Thinking and Better Living through Critical Thinking . FT Press, 2012.
• Fasko, Jr., Daniel, ed. Critical Thinking and Reasoning: Current Research, Theory, and Practice . Hampton Press, 2003.
• Fisher, Alec. Critical Thinking: An Introduction . Cambridge University Press, 2011.
• Paul, Richard and Linda Elder. Critical Thinking: Learn the Tools the Best Thinkers Use . Pearson Prentice Hall, 2006.
• Faculty Focus article, A Syllabus Tip: Embed Big Questions
• The Critical Thinking Community
• The Critical Thinking Community’s The Thinker’s Guides Series and The Art of Socratic Questioning

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Higher Order Thinking: Bloom’s Taxonomy

Many students start college using the study strategies they used in high school, which is understandable—the strategies worked in the past, so why wouldn’t they work now? As you may have already figured out, college is different. Classes may be more rigorous (yet may seem less structured), your reading load may be heavier, and your professors may be less accessible. For these reasons and others, you’ll likely find that your old study habits aren’t as effective as they used to be. Part of the reason for this is that you may not be approaching the material in the same way as your professors. In this handout, we provide information on Bloom’s Taxonomy—a way of thinking about your schoolwork that can change the way you study and learn to better align with how your professors think (and how they grade).

Why higher order thinking leads to effective study

Most students report that high school was largely about remembering and understanding large amounts of content and then demonstrating this comprehension periodically on tests and exams. Bloom’s Taxonomy is a framework that starts with these two levels of thinking as important bases for pushing our brains to five other higher order levels of thinking—helping us move beyond remembering and recalling information and move deeper into application, analysis, synthesis, evaluation, and creation—the levels of thinking that your professors have in mind when they are designing exams and paper assignments. Because it is in these higher levels of thinking that our brains truly and deeply learn information, it’s important that you integrate higher order thinking into your study habits.

The following categories can help you assess your comprehension of readings, lecture notes, and other course materials. By creating and answering questions from a variety of categories, you can better anticipate and prepare for all types of exam questions. As you learn and study, start by asking yourself questions and using study methods from the level of remembering. Then, move progressively through the levels to push your understanding deeper—making your studying more meaningful and improving your long-term retention.

Level 1: Remember

This level helps us recall foundational or factual information: names, dates, formulas, definitions, components, or methods.

Level 2: Understand

Understanding means that we can explain main ideas and concepts and make meaning by interpreting, classifying, summarizing, inferring, comparing, and explaining.

Level 3: Apply

Application allows us to recognize or use concepts in real-world situations and to address when, where, or how to employ methods and ideas.

Level 4: Analyze

Analysis means breaking a topic or idea into components or examining a subject from different perspectives. It helps us see how the “whole” is created from the “parts.” It’s easy to miss the big picture by getting stuck at a lower level of thinking and simply remembering individual facts without seeing how they are connected. Analysis helps reveal the connections between facts.

Level 5: Synthesize

Synthesizing means considering individual elements together for the purpose of drawing conclusions, identifying themes, or determining common elements. Here you want to shift from “parts” to “whole.”

Level 6: Evaluate

Evaluating means making judgments about something based on criteria and standards. This requires checking and critiquing an argument or concept to form an opinion about its value. Often there is not a clear or correct answer to this type of question. Rather, it’s about making a judgment and supporting it with reasons and evidence.

Level 7: Create

Creating involves putting elements together to form a coherent or functional whole. Creating includes reorganizing elements into a new pattern or structure through planning. This is the highest and most advanced level of Bloom’s Taxonomy.

Pairing Bloom’s Taxonomy with other effective study strategies

While higher order thinking is an excellent way to approach learning new information and studying, you should pair it with other effective study strategies. Check out some of these links to read up on other tools and strategies you can try:

• Study Smarter, Not Harder
• Simple Study Template
• Using Concept Maps
• Group Study
• Evidence-Based Study Strategies Video
• Memory Tips Video
• All of our resources

Other UNC resources

If you’d like some individual assistance using higher order questions (or with anything regarding your academic success), check out some of your UNC resources:

• Academic Coaching: Make an appointment with an academic coach at the Learning Center to discuss your study habits one-on-one.
• Office Hours : Make an appointment with your professor or TA to discuss course material and how to be successful in the class.

Works consulted

Anderson, L. W., Krathwohl, D.R., Airasian, P.W., Cruikshank, K.A., Mayer, R.E., Pintrich, P.R., Wittrock, M.C (2001). A taxonomy of learning, teaching, and assessing: A revision of Bloom’s taxonomy of educational objectives. New York, NY: Longman.

“Bloom’s Taxonomy.” University of Waterloo. Retrieved from https://uwaterloo.ca/centre-for-teaching-excellence/teaching-resources/teaching-tips/planning-courses-and-assignments/course-design/blooms-taxonomy

“Bloom’s Taxonomy.” Retrieved from http://www.bloomstaxonomy.org/Blooms%20Taxonomy%20questions.pdf

Overbaugh, R., and Schultz, L. (n.d.). “Image of two versions of Bloom’s Taxonomy.” Norfolk, VA: Old Dominion University. Retrieved from https://www.odu.edu/content/dam/odu/col-dept/teaching-learning/docs/blooms-taxonomy-handout.pdf

If you enjoy using our handouts, we appreciate contributions of acknowledgement.

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How to Lead Students to Engage in Higher Order Thinking

Asking students a series of essential questions at the start of a course signals that deep engagement is a requirement.

I teach multigrade, theme-based courses like Spirituality in Literature and The Natural World in Literature to high school sophomores, juniors, and seniors. And like most English language arts teachers, I’ve taught courses built around the organizing principles of genre (Introduction to Drama), time period and geography (American Literature From 1950), and even assessment instrument (A.P. Literature).

No matter what conceptual framework guides the course I’m teaching, though, I begin and anchor it with what I call a thinking inventory.

Thinking Inventories and Essential Questions

Essential questions—a staple of project-based learning—call on students’ higher order thinking and connect their lived experience with important texts and ideas. A thinking inventory is a carefully curated set of about 10 essential questions of various types, and completing one the first thing I ask students to do in every course I teach.

Although a thinking inventory is made up of questions, it’s more than a questionnaire. When we say we’re “taking inventory”—whether we’re in a warehouse or a relationship—we mean we’re taking stock of where things stand at a given moment in time, with the understanding that those things are fluid and provisional. With a thinking inventory, we’re taking stock of students’ thinking, experiences, and sense-making at the beginning of the course.

A well-designed thinking inventory formalizes the essential questions of any course and serves as a touchpoint for both teacher and students throughout that course. For a teacher, writing a course’s thinking inventory can help separate the essential from the nonessential when planning. And starting your class with a thinking inventory signals to students that higher order thinking is both required and valued.

How to Design an Effective Thinking Inventory

I tell students the thinking inventory is a document we’ll be living with—revisiting and referring to often—and that they should spend time mulling their answers before writing them down. The inventory should include a variety of essential questions, including ones that invite students to share relevant experiences.

I may ask students about their current knowledge base or life experience (What’s the best example of empathy you’ve ever witnessed?). I may ask them to make predictions or imagine scenarios (How will an American Literature course in 100 years look different from today’s American Literature course?). Or I may ask perennial questions (To what extent is it possible for human beings to change fundamentally?).

Here are a few of the questions I asked students to address at the start of a course called The Outsider in Literature:

• Who is the most visionary person you know? How do you know they’re visionary? Is there anything about them you want to emulate? Anything about them that frightens you?
• What are the risks of rebelling? Of not rebelling?  Explain.
• What would happen if there were no outsiders? How would the world, and your world, be different?
• Do you think there are any ongoing conflicts between groups that are intractable—that will likely never be resolved? What is the root of the intractability? What would need to happen in order to resolve the conflict? Be specific.
• Who is the most deviant, threatening outsider you can think of? Tell us what makes them threatening.
• To what extent do you think that teenagers, as a group, are (by definition) outsiders?

How I Use Thinking Inventories

On the first day of class, I give students the inventory for homework. Because I expect well-thought-out answers and generative thinking, I assign it in chunks over two nights, and we spend at least the second and third class meetings discussing their answers.

Throughout the course, I use the inventory both implicitly and explicitly. I purposefully weave inventory questions into discussions and student writing prompts. More explicitly, I use inventory questions as a framework for pre- and post-reading activities, and as prompts for reading responses, formal writing, and journaling.

The inventory functions as a kind of time stamp that documents each student’s habits of mind, opinions, and ways of framing experience at the start of the year or semester. At the midpoint and at the end of the course, I have students return to their inventory, choose a question they’d now answer differently, and reflect on why and how their thinking has changed.

The Inventory as a Bridge Between Students and Content

By including a variety of essential questions (practical and experiential, conceptual and theoretical) and making a course’s aims explicit, the inventory invites all students into the conversation and the material from day one. It gives a deep thinker with slower processing speed or attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, for example, time to orient themselves to the course’s core questions. Meanwhile, the inventory challenges students who see themselves as high achievers to respond authentically to thorny questions that have no right answers.

In addition, using a thinking inventory models how to ask good questions; gives introverts and anxious students an entry point because cold calling becomes warmer (I can ask, “What did you say on your inventory?”); and cultivates a community of learners connected by real, worthwhile inquiry and communal discourse.

Recently, a student reflecting on his inventory at the end of a course wrote that he was taken aback by how intolerant of “loser characters” he’d seemed just a few months prior on his inventory. He noted that he’d been through some upheaval since then. And he ended his paper with the observation that empathy—for people and characters—grows “when you know their backstory.”

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Can You Take Me Higher: Building Higher-Order Thinking Skills

JULY 15, 2019

Promoting "higher-order thinking skills" (HOTS) is almost universally acknowledged to be an important educational goal. But what do we really mean when we talk about higher-order thinking skills, and why do they matter? In the last blog in our "Brain-Based Learning" series, we're going to take a closer look at higher-order thinking and how we can support the development of these important cognitive skills.

Preparing Students for the Information Age

Over the last 150 years, our economy has undergone massive shifts, from an agrarian economy, to the Industrial Age, to the Post-Industrial Age of mass manufacturing. With each shift, the demands and expectations on students and the workforce have changed.

Now, we are deep in the Information Age, also known as the Knowledge Economy. And the demands on our students are greater than ever.

Today's students are entering a workforce where opportunities for unskilled labor are shrinking and the economic divide between skilled and unskilled workers has grown into a chasm. Automation and globalization have shrunk the manufacturing sector, once a reliable source of well-paying jobs, from 24% of the U.S. workforce in 1960 to just 8% in 2016. The jobs that remain typically require much higher literacy, problem solving, and critical thinking skills than were expected for the average worker a generation ago. Similar shifts are happening across other sectors of the economy.

The majority of the jobs of tomorrow—and most especially those that pay a living wage—will require students to apply higher-order thinking skills.

Defining Higher-Order Thinking: Bloom and Beyond

What exactly do we mean by "higher order thinking skills"? "HOTS", as they are sometimes called, are complex cognitive skills involving analysis, evaluation, synthesis, judgment, and creativity. Higher-order thinking requires students to go beyond simply memorizing facts. Instead, students are expected to do something with the information they are learning. This may mean identifying relationships between ideas, combining and applying concepts to solve a novel problem, or generating entirely new ideas based on what they have learned.

Benjamin Bloom was among the first to codify the idea of "lower" and "higher" thinking skills. First developed in the 1950s, Bloom's Taxonomy is still widely recognized by educators today. In this framework, skills are thought to build upon each other, starting with the most basic skills (recall and comprehension), progressing through more complex skills (application and analysis), and culminating with higher-order thinking skills such as synthesis, evaluation and creation. The pyramid has been revised over the years, but the basic idea remains the same.

Other researchers have developed newer ways to think about higher-order thinking skills. In A Taxonomy for Teaching, Learning, and Assessing , the authors outline four levels of cognition:

• Factual Knowledge : Terminology, details, and elements.
• Conceptual Knowledge : Classification and categories; principles and generalizations; theories, models, and structures.
• Procedural Knowledge : Skills, applications, subject-specific techniques and methods.
• Metacognitive Knowledge : Strategy, context, conditions, awareness of cognitive tasks, self-knowledge and assessment.

Creativity, Critical Thinking and 21 st -Century Skills

However you define higher-order thinking, the goal is to get students to move beyond simply recalling facts on demand and start using knowledge in complex ways.

Higher-order thinking is an important component of 21 st Century Skills . These are the skills that are most in-demand in the Knowledge Economy. They include:

• Learning skills : Critical thinking, creativity, collaboration, and communication.
• Literacy skills : Information literacy, media literacy, and technology literacy.
• Life skills : Flexibility, leadership, initiative, productivity, and social skills.

All of these skills are grounded in higher-order thinking. For example, media literacy requires students to be able to evaluate sources of information, determine which sources and facts are credible, and put new information into context with other information. Creativity is rooted in the ability to synthesize information from different sources, evaluate different ideas, and combine concepts in new ways. 21 st Century Skills are, fundamentally, different ways of combining and expressing higher-order thinking skills.

Developing these skills, including the ability to combine different styles of thinking and determine which cognitive skills are most appropriate for the task at hand, will prepare students for the demands of the 21 st -Century workplace. It will also give them the tools they need to become lifelong learners, participate fully as citizens in our democracy, make positive connections with others, and reach their personal goals.

Thinking on Multiple Levels

Higher-order thinking is grounded in the ability to use and combine a variety of cognitive strategies flexibly and appropriately. Students must be able to:

• recognize the thinking skills appropriate for the task at hand;
• activate the appropriate cognitive processes, and
• combine these cognitive processes to engage with concepts on multiple levels

Thinking Maps is uniquely suited to developing these skills. As students become proficient in using the eight Maps and activating the cognitive skills behind them, they also develop the metacognitive skills necessary to recognize the kinds of thinking needed for various learning tasks. Combining Maps allows students to engage with content on multiple levels, deliberately moving from basic understanding (defining, describing) to more complex forms of thinking (analyzing, categorizing, synthesizing, and creating).

Students also learn to use "Frames of Reference" when creating their Maps, which are supported by guiding questions. These "framing" questions encourage students to think about sources of information, context, and points of view. They are also used to stimulate metacognition and help students evaluate their learning process and outcomes.

Used in this way, the Maps provide a springboard for cognition, metacognition, critical thinking, and creativity—all of the skills students need for success in college, career, and beyond.

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What Is Higher-Order Thinking and How Do I Teach It?

Go beyond basic remembering and understanding.

Educators know that people learn in a variety of ways and that we often learn best when we can make connections to the material on a deeper level. That’s why higher-order thinking is such a valuable skill, one that serves students well throughout their school years and beyond. But what exactly does the term mean? And how can teachers build higher-order thinking skills in their students? Learn what you need to know here.

What is higher-order thinking?

Source: Vanderbilt University

Higher-order thinking refers to the top levels of cognitive thinking, as laid out in the Bloom’s Taxonomy model. When we use higher-order thinking, we push beyond basic memorization and recall to analyze and synthesize information. These are the skills that help us evaluate information and think critically. We also use these skills to develop new ideas and concepts, building on previous knowledge to create something entirely new.

Bloom’s Taxonomy

Benjamin Bloom headed a team of educational researchers in the 1950s and led the development of the model that bears his name today. He and his team broke cognitive thinking into six levels, shown as a pyramid. The bottom levels provide the foundation for the higher-order thinking skills at the top.

Source: Revised Bloom’s Taxonomy/University of Michigan

If you first learned about Bloom’s Taxonomy more than 20 years ago, it looked a little bit different. In 2001, education experts decided to revise the taxonomy to make it more accurate and easier for educators to understand and apply. They changed the category names from nouns to verbs, showing the action learners would take for each. And they determined that the top two tiers should actually be switched, making “Create” (Synthesis) the highest order of thinking.

Learn more about the history and development of Bloom’s Taxonomy here.

What are the Lower-Order Thinking Skills (LOTS)?

Source: Lower-Order Thinking Skills/Helpful Professor

The bottom three levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy are referred to as the Lower-Order Thinking Skills (LOTS). It’s important to note that even though these skills are considered lower on the pyramid, they’re still extremely important. Think of these as the foundational skills students must have to support their higher-order thinking.

These are skills like memorizing math facts, defining vocabulary words, or knowing the main characters and basic plot points of a story. This is the kind of information you can check using flash cards, spelling tests, true/false questions, and more. There are many basic facts that kids must master so they can quickly recall them as needed.

Check out 21 Ways To Build Background Knowledge to learn more.

When you understand a concept, you can explain how it works to someone else. True understanding is more than memorization or reciting facts. It’s the difference between a child reciting by rote “one times four is four, two times four is eight, three times four is twelve,” versus recognizing that multiplication is the same as adding a number to itself a certain number of times. This is why we often ask students to “show their work” or “show their thinking” on math tests.

See 20 Ways To Check for Understanding for more information.

When you apply your knowledge, you take a concept you’ve already mastered and apply it to new situations. For instance, a student learning to read doesn’t need to memorize every word. Instead, they use their skills in sounding out letters to tackle each new word as they come across it.

Explore 25 Easy Ways To Make Math Practice Fun here.

Which levels constitute higher-order thinking skills (HOTS)?

Source: Higher-Order Thinking Skills/Helpful Professor

The top three levels make up the Higher-Order Thinking Skills (HOTS), also known as critical thinking skills . When students use these skills, they delve deeper into information. Rather than simply accepting facts, they explore the reasons behind them and make cause-and-effect connections. They evaluate the validity of facts and use them to synthesize new concepts, ideas, and inventions.

When we analyze something, we don’t take it at face value. Analysis requires us to find facts that stand up to inquiry. We put aside personal feelings or beliefs, and instead identify and scrutinize primary sources for information. This is a complex skill, one we hone throughout our entire lives. When students compare and contrast multiple concepts, sort and categorize, or ask “why” questions, they’re analyzing.

Try these 25 Cause-and-Effect Lesson Plans and Activities to help kids analyze information.

Evaluating means reflecting on analyzed information, selecting the most relevant and reliable facts to help us make choices or form opinions. True evaluation requires us to put aside our own biases and accept that there may be other valid points of view, even if we don’t necessarily agree with them. Students evaluate when they debate topics, write persuasive essays, assess their own or others’ writings, and more.

Use these 35 Strong Persuasive Writing Examples to show students how evaluation works in practice.

At the highest level, students take the facts that they’ve mastered, evaluated, and analyzed, and use them to create something entirely new. This might be designing a science experiment, building a computer program, writing a paper putting forth new ideas, authoring a story or making art, and other creative activities.

Discover 40 Ways To Make More Time for Creativity in Your Lesson Plans .

Why is it so important to teach higher-order thinking?

Source: Equal Levels/University of Michigan

While remembering, understanding, and applying are key skills, they don’t really develop students into lifelong learners and critical thinkers. As kids often point out, if they need to know the date of the start of the American Civil War or the third law of motion, they can just look it up in a book or online.

What really matters is what we do with the information we have. Higher-order skills are the ones people use in daily life to make informed decisions and create new products and processes. They help us think critically, something that’s incredibly vital in this age of constant information overload.

When we teach higher-order thinking skills, we give students the ability to solve problems, develop creative solutions, make smart choices, and evaluate the validity of information. Kids grow into adults who understand how to think carefully about the world and feel confident enough to share their own ideas, concepts, and creations with others.

Read more about the importance of higher-order thinking here.

How do I teach higher-order thinking?

Source: The IDEA Lab

There are a multitude of ways to encourage higher-order thinking in your students. While some say that kids don’t really begin to develop these skills until upper elementary, others argue that it’s never too soon to challenge kids to make connections and ask questions. You can tweak these quick higher-order thinking strategies to work in any classroom, no matter the age or subject.

1. Ask higher-order thinking questions.

Keep a list of higher-order thinking questions on hand, and use them regularly in class. Consider making a bulletin board or anchor chart with some of your favorites, and refer kids to it as they learn. Get a huge list of higher-order thinking questions here.

2. Encourage discussion and debate

When kids learn to disagree respectfully and argue their own opinions using facts to back their beliefs, they’re preparing to take part in the discourse of the world at large. Encourage those with conflicting points of view to share them in your classroom, and teach kids how to analyze and evaluate those points though discussion and debate. Try these resources:

• 60 Funny Debate Topics for Kids of All Ages
• 100 Winning Debate Topics for Middle School Students
• 100 High School Debate Topics To Engage Every Student
• 110+ Controversial Debate Topics to Challenge Your Students
• 60 Interesting Persuasive Essay Topics for Kids and Teens

3. Try STEM challenges.

STEM challenges encourage kids to come up with their own unique answers to problems. They use their knowledge and understanding of science, technology, engineering, and math to analyze and evaluate the challenge and create new solutions. Start with these 50 STEM Activities To Help Kids Think Outside the Box . Then, visit our archive of STEM challenges and science experiments for ideas .

4. Use graphic organizers.

Graphic organizers are tools that let kids make connections, create a plan, and communicate effectively. A good organizer simplifies complex information and lays it out in a way that makes it easier for a learner to digest. Graphic organizers may include text and images, depending on the purpose and student’s learning style. Read all about graphic organizers and learn how to use them here.

5. Incorporate project-based learning.

Project-based learning uses HOTS like analysis and evaluation, collaboration and communication, and problem-solving. As students conduct their hands-on projects, they dig deeper into a real-world topic and make personal connections to the knowledge and skills they’re gaining. In many ways, PBL is more like the work adults do in their daily jobs, especially because students collaborate with others outside their school community. Discover the basics of project-based learning here , then check out 55+ Real-World Project-Based Learning Ideas for All Ages and Interests .

Have more questions about higher-order thinking? Come talk it over with other educators in the WeAreTeachers HELPLINE group on Facebook .

Plus, what is critical thinking and why do we need to teach it .

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50+ Higher-Order Thinking Questions To Challenge Your Students

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Teaching Strategies that Enhance Higher-Order Thinking

Janelle cox.

• October 16, 2019

One of the main 21st century components that teachers want their students to use is higher-order thinking. This is when students use complex ways to think about what they are learning.

Higher-order thinking takes thinking to a whole new level. Students using it are understanding higher levels rather than just memorizing facts. They would have to understand the facts, infer them, and connect them to other concepts.

Here are 10 teaching strategies to enhance higher-order thinking skills in your students.

1. Help Determine What Higher-Order Thinking Is

Help students understand what higher-order thinking is. Explain to them what it is and why they need it. Help them understand their own strengths and challenges. You can do this by showing them how they can ask themselves good questions. That leads us to the next strategy.

2. Connect Concepts

Lead students through the process of how to connect one concept to another. By doing this you are teaching them to connect what they already know with what they are learning. This level of thinking will help students learn to make connections whenever it is possible, which will help them gain even more understanding. For example, let’s say that the concept they are learning is “Chinese New Year.” An even broader concept would be “Holidays.”

3. Teach Students to Infer

Teach students to make inferences by giving them “real-world” examples. You can start by giving students a picture of a people standing in line at a soup kitchen. Ask them to look at the picture and focus on the details. Then, ask them to make inferences based on what they see in the picture. Another way to teach young students about how to infer is to teach an easy concept like weather. Ask students to put on their raincoat and boots, then ask them to infer what they think the weather looks like outside.

4. Encourage Questioning

A classroom where students feel free to ask questions without any negative reactions from their peers or their teachers is a classroom where students feel free to be creative. Encourage students to ask questions, and if for some reason you can’t get to their question during class time, show them how they can answer it themselves or have them save the question until the following day.

5. Use Graphic Organizers

Graphic organizers provide students with a nice way to frame their thoughts in an organized manner. By drawing diagrams or mind maps, students are able to better connect concepts and see their relationships. This will help students develop a habit of connecting concepts.

6. Teach Problem-Solving Strategies

Teach students to use a step-by-step method for solving problems. This way of higher-order thinking will help them solve problems faster and more easily. Encourage students to use alternative methods to solve problems as well as offer them different problem-solving methods.

7. Encourage Creative Thinking

Creative thinking is when students invent, imagine, and design what they are thinking. Using creative senses helps students process and understand information better. Research shows that when students utilize creative higher-order thinking skills , it indeed increases their understanding. Encourage students to think “outside of the box.”

8. Use Mind Movies

When concepts that are being learned are difficult, encourage students to create a movie in their mind. Teach them to close their eyes and picture it like a movie playing. This way of higher-order thinking will truly help them understand in a powerful, unique way.

9. Teach Students to Elaborate Their Answers

Higher-order thinking requires students to really understand a concept, not repeat it or memorize it. Encourage students to elaborate their answers by asking the right questions that make students explain their thoughts in more detail.

10. Teach QARs

Question-Answer-Relationships, or QARs, teach students to label the type of question that is being asked and then use that information to help them formulate an answer. Students must decipher if the answer can be found in a text or online or if they must rely on their own prior knowledge to answer it. This strategy has been found to be effective for higher-order thinking because students become more aware of the relationship between the information in a text and their prior knowledge, which helps them decipher which strategy to use when they need to seek an answer.

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Higher order thinking

This page provides guidance on supporting the high-ability student to develop their higher order thinking skills.

The importance of higher order thinking

It is easy to assume that students who appear to move through tasks quickly have all the skills they need. A teacher may also think these students have little more to develop. Yet, the development of cognitive and metacognitive skills has no ceiling. 

There is always more for high-ability students to learn and room for them to grow. 

If students exceed curriculum level outcomes, tasks can be made more challenging by targeting higher order thinking. This will set the conditions for students to extend their learning.

What we know

Teachers who plan to teach and extend students' higher order thinking skills promote growth for their high-ability students. Higher order thinking is often used to refer to 'transfer', 'critical thinking' and 'problem solving.' These can be defined as:

• transfer - the student's ability to apply knowledge and skills to new contexts (for example, a student in year 5 learning about fractions applied her knowledge to a real world scenario)
• critical thinking - the ability to reason, reflect, and decide what to believe or do next
• problem solving - meeting a goal that cannot be met with a memorised solution (Brookhart, 2010, 2011).

From theory to practice

Teachers may know some thinking skill taxonomies. These may include:

• Bloom's Revised Taxonomy (remember, understand, apply, analyse, evaluate, create) (Anderson & Krathwohl, 2001)
• Webb's Depth of Knowledge (recall and reproduction, application of skills, strategic thinking, extended thinking) (Webb, 2002).

These models can be used to plan activities that target students' higher order thinking. Focusing on content and skills at the highest level (Level 4 – Extended thinking) can help extend students' thinking skills. Low and high cognitive questions can also be used to target activities towards specific levels of thinking skills.

Strategies and tools

Strategies that teachers may use in their classes to encourage higher order thinking include:

• posing provocative questions, statements or scenarios to generate discussion (for example, the use of 'what if' questions)
• requiring students to explain concepts using analogies, similes and metaphors
• posing problems with no single solution, or that have multiple pathways to a solution
• modelling a range of problem solving strategies
• using concept mapping to assist students to make connections between and within ideas
• creating a makerspace in your classroom to encourage creativity, critical thinking and design thinking
• posing paradoxes for students to consider (for example: In a study of World War 1, students can be presented with the statement: 'War nurses saved lives, but they also contributed to deaths')
• creating an 'I wonder' wall in your classroom
• conducting a Socratic dialogue .

Tools that can assist teachers to encourage higher order thinking include:

• depth of knowledge table (informed by Webb 2002)
• low and high cognitive questions exemplar for reading comprehension
• SOLO taxonomy

Focus questions for professional learning

• How do you, or can you, plan for higher order thinking in your lessons?
• How does higher order thinking support the needs of the high-ability student?
• What thinking skills are considered to be of higher order in the depth of knowledge table?

Anderson, L.W., & Krathwohl, D. (2001). A taxonomy for learning, teaching, and Assessing: A revision of Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives. Allyn & Bacon, MA (Pearson Education Group).

Brookhart, S. M. (2010). How to assess higher-order thinking skills in your classroom. ASCD.

Fleming, L. (2015). Worlds of making: Best practices for establishing a makerspace for your school. Corwin Press.

Gamwell, P., & Daly, J. (2017). The wonder wall: Leading creative schools and organizations in an age of complexity. Corwin Press.

Webb, N. L. (2002). Depth-of-knowledge levels for four content areas. Language Arts.

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Encouraging Higher Order Thinking Skills in Students

Rigor is one of those ambiguous terms in education where everyone has a different definition. while….

By Andrew Bauld

Rigor is one of those ambiguous terms in education where everyone has a different definition. While it can vary widely in practice, rigor means that students are engaged in challenging tasks. Rigorous learning does not mean overly complex activities. Instead, teachers can create the rigor they need by developing learning experiences focusing on students using higher-order thinking skills.

The XQ high schools provide several examples. At Purdue Polytechnic High School in Indianapolis, students built a boat out of cardboard to cross a swimming pool for their passion projects. At New Harmony High School in New Orleans, students wrote original stories imagining a future ravaged by climate change . At Latitude High School in Oakland, California, students built tiny houses for unhoused youth. While all different, each of these projects created authentic learning experiences with rigorous elements that encourage students to apply higher-order thinking skills to their learning.

Through higher-order thinking (HOT) skills, students move beyond memorizing and regurgitating material–instead actively analyzing, evaluating, and creating solutions to showcase their learning mastery.

High school is an ideal time to foster higher-order thinking skills when considering developmental milestones in adolescence. As students enter high school, they are more likely to comprehend abstract thinking, develop unique ideas, and analyze various perspectives different from their own. That’s the idea behind our XQ Learner Outcomes , which activates higher-order thinking by asking students to become original thinkers for an uncertain world, holders of foundational knowledge, and self-directed learners for life.  

Because students are entering the classroom at different levels of understanding, planning lessons that target, differentiate, and scaffold HOT skills requires a lot of foresight. However, project-based and  inquiry-based learning models are ideal pathways where teachers can effortlessly target those skills. By understanding and defining what higher-order thinking skills look like, teachers can structure their curriculum more easily to teach these competencies to students, empowering them as the next generation of thinkers and creators.

Students at PSI High, an XQ school in Sanford, Florida, create solutions for a local engineering industry by constructing a smart mirror for the offices. (Photo by Maya Richardson)

What are Higher-Order Thinking Skills?

Higher-order thinking is a sequence of thinking skills that moves students beyond rote memorization into more comprehensive levels of thinking. It asks students to take facts and information they have memorized and apply them in a new, active way—like making an inference—connecting ideas into larger concepts, or coming up with an original creation. 

One common resource for thinking about this progression from lower to higher-order thinking is Bloom’s Taxonomy , coined by a group of educators led by Benjamin Bloom in 1956 and updated in 2001. The revised taxonomy has six levels:

Another framework for thinking about HOT skills is Webb’s Depth of Knowledge , developed by Norman Webb. These four levels include:

• Recall and Reproduction
• Skills and Concepts
• Strategic Thinking
• Extended Thinking

Both Bloom’s Taxonomy and Webb’s Depth of Knowledge are helpful starting places for educators when planning complex, active learning activities. Teachers can use these frameworks to plan lessons by identifying the kind of higher-order thinking skills they’d like students to apply. Using the principles of backward design , teachers start by asking questions like what information students need to understand at the beginning of a project so that by the end, they can come up with an original creation.

What do these higher-order categories—creating, evaluating, and extended thinking—look like in the classroom? Here, we break down several types of higher-order thinking, with examples of what they each look like in practice.

Critical Thinking

Critical thinking is another nuanced term in education that often has different interpretations. At a basic level, critical thinking is the ability to question, interpret, and make judgments about information rather than accepting an idea or concept at face value. In general, critical thinking is something students do.

An example of critical thinking in the classroom might be having students analyze a news headline. Educator and instructional coach Dara Savage explains how she uses the FIRE method to help her students think critically about news headlines, asking students to: 

• F ocus and respond to the headline
• I dentify a phrase or piece of the photo and write about it
• R eframe their initial response around a specific word, phrase, or section they identified
• E xchange their thoughts with a classmate, connecting the conversation to broader topics in class

The key to what Savage does here that accelerates student HOT skills comes in the “exchange” phase of their protocol. Students must have an avenue for sharing their new understandings, which allows them to analyze, synthesize, and evaluate feedback they receive from their peers. 

In this way, critical thinking asks students to go beyond memorizing and understanding new information to analyze and evaluate what they’re learning. In doing so, students need to make active connections between concepts and ideas, such as comparing a new piece of information to what they know to be true from previous learning or their own lives.

Comprehension

Comprehension often appears in reading and literacy practices; however, like critical thinking, comprehension means understanding a subject’s explicit and implicit meaning. Students’ comprehension of algebra means understanding how to apply and use those same formulas to make predictions and evaluate future concepts. A step up from memorization, comprehension asks students to apply their knowledge to an evolving sense of understanding.

Unlike memorization, comprehension is an active process . For students to understand a new concept, they must extract meaning first and be able to connect it to the knowledge they already grasp. Doing so allows students to understand how new information connects to their larger understanding of themselves and their material realities.

One way of thinking about comprehension is through Marzano’s Nine Instructional strategies , a research-backed sequence to ensure rigorous learning. In this framework, building comprehension comes from helping students interact with new knowledge and helping them practice and deepen new understanding. Strategies to use at these levels include:

• Chunking content into digestible bites
• Helping students examine their reasoning
• Helping students practice skills, strategies, and processes

Metacognition

Metacognition means thinking about thinking . As a resource from Reading Rockets on higher-order thinking explains, metacognition asks students to become active participants in their learning , considering questions like: How well have I mastered this concept? What additional knowledge do I need to analyze this piece of information? What are my strengths as a learner, and Where do I need more support?

The Learning Center at UNC defines evaluation as “making judgments about something based on criteria and standards.” Often, evaluating something doesn’t mean students will arrive at one “correct” answer. Instead, students make a judgment and then—crucially—support that judgment with reasoning and evidence.

Questions teachers can ask students to spark evaluation include:

• Do you like, dislike, agree, or disagree with an author’s perspective or decision?
• What would you do if asked to choose a given situation?
• When faced with multiple approaches to a challenge, which approach is most effective?

To encourage stronger evaluation and not just surface-level answers, teachers should follow these questions by asking students to go deeper. How can students support their response by synthesizing evidence, critically evaluating sources, and bringing examples from their own life?

Synthesis and Analysis

Synthesis and analysis are two complementary ways to activate students’ higher-order thinking by helping them understand the connections between different pieces of knowledge or information. The Learning Center at UNC defines synthesis as: “considering individual elements together for the purpose of drawing conclusions, identifying themes, or determining common elements.” Synthesis means shifting from looking at individual parts to considering the whole instead. Analysis asks students to do the opposite: break down larger concepts into smaller pieces.

Common synthesis activities include those that ask students to:

• Generalize information and construct new understandings
• Explore relationships between different concepts
• Identify patterns and categorize information.

Analysis activities use questions that ask students to:

• Understand how different parts connect to the whole
• Deconstruct and understand various perspective
• Examine and evaluate individuals parts of a concept or problem

An inference is “a conclusion or opinion formed because of known facts or evidence.” Implicit in this definition is higher-order thinking because students take facts or evidence they comprehend and use them to create new knowledge or understanding. 

Sometimes students see generating inferences as a guess or jumping to a conclusion. By breaking down the mental steps that go into making an inference , you can help students avoid this pitfall. Slow down their thinking to arrive at an understanding based on evidence and critical thinking. For example, when making an inference, students should:

• Begin by identifying relevant facts and evidence
• Consider any assumptions or biases they might hold that are impacting how they interpret facts and evidence
• Test inference to see if they hold up or if they need to revise and reconsider

How to use Higher-Order Thinking Skills in the Classroom

Educators should begin with the end in mind to teach higher-order thinking skills in the classroom. Using backward design as a process, start by asking questions such as, what kind of thinking will students need to apply to achieve success? From there, teachers can more effectively scaffold students’ lower-order thinking skills to support a deeper foundation of conceptual thinking–such as memorization and identification.

This design cycle works best with overlapping teaching methods, such as project-based, inquiry-based, and experiential learning. At PSI High , an XQ school in Sanford, Florida, students designed micromuseums to explore different facets of local history. Through this project, they applied higher-order thinking skills to analyze the needs of their community and create original, new ways of approaching local histories.

Experiential learning uses a similar approach where students learn by doing, typically in an environment outside of the traditional classroom. Successful, layered PBL activities usually incorporate experiential learning activities that activate student HOT skills. In inquiry-based learning, students approach learning like scientists, constructing knowledge rather than regurgitating it.

Each method requires students to use higher-order thinking to apply their skills and knowledge to unique, open-ended situations. Success in these methods means designing learning around key objectives and providing opportunities to assess and reflect on mastery. Below is a step-by-step walkthrough of this process.

Identify Learning Styles

Effective scaffolding involves teachers identifying how their students learn best. Higher-order thinking strategies can be adapted to support many different types of learning, but it’s essential to know the stepstones and accommodations necessary to ensure all students learn equally. Consider the neurodiversity of your classroom when planning out your objectives—how can I incorporate opportunities for visual, verbal, concrete, and abstract thinking? How much time will my students need to complete more complex thinking tasks? How will I check for student understanding?

Educator Karen Harris explains how she uses thinking inventories —or a series of essential questions—to include all learners in higher-order thinking. By posing thinking inventories at the beginning of a unit, students can think over the questions at their own pace throughout their learning and approach the essential questions through various activities before they return to the questions at the end of the project.

Define Objectives

Begin your project or lesson by explicitly defining what higher-order thinking skills students should master within the project context. Use resources like Bloom’s Taxonomy and Webb’s Depth of Knowledge to describe what kind of higher-order thinking students should be able to do—such as analyzing, synthesizing, or creating.  Clear objectives will ensure that the chosen activities align with the thinking you want to promote. Common pitfalls of higher-order thinking lessons include lessons that look good from the outside but miss the intended thinking skill. For example, students might “create” a diorama representing a scene from a book they’ve read without creating new knowledge about it. Instead, a higher-order thinking task that more effectively achieves the objective to “create” might ask students to write an original story imagining a character from the book in a new situation. But to ensure students are operating at a high level, build in time at lower levels that reinforce their comprehension by activating prior knowledge.

Select Appropriate Activities & Lessons

Meaningful and engaged learning , an important XQ Design Principal for schools, happens when students have access to authentic learning experiences. As you plan activities and lessons, consider how to create authentic learning experiences by selecting activities that connect to students’ lived experiences . How can you build lessons around real-world challenges? When students see the relevance of learning to their lives, they are more likely to feel motivated to ask more profound questions that lead to higher-order thinking.

Explore these strategies to emphasize relevance and rigor in higher-order thinking lessons:

• Choose compelling topics relevant to students’ lives, allowing them to explore diverse perspectives.
• Make local connections, including partnerships with local nonprofits and businesses.
• Create authentic projects that tackle complex, real-world problems, especially if those projects can focus on their local communities.

Assess and Reflect

Traditional assessment often asks students to demonstrate memorization of knowledge and information. While many standardized tests use multiple choice questions framed around “analyze this” or “evaluate that,” these questions are more suited for identifying comprehension rather than a student’s ability to apply HOT skills. 

Assessments of higher-order thinking should focus on students’ depth of thinking and ability to apply reason. If teachers are looking to assess a student’s progress on the objectives from the beginning of the lesson, a constructed response or reflection on a project can provide a much more robust picture of a student’s HOT skill development. Summative assessments are best reserved for monitoring student progress and should aim at adjusting instruction only. 

Higher-Order Thinking and XQ Learner Outcomes

Higher-order thinking supports academic achievement by moving students beyond memorization to build creative and critical thinking skills. Rather than teaching students to memorize content for the sake of a test, higher-order thinking prepares students as original thinkers and learners for life —self-directed, curious, and able to seek out and apply information to solve complex problems. That’s the goal of the XQ Learner Outcomes.

Explore these strategies for higher-order thinking in your classroom to deepen student engagement and prepare students to meet future problems creatively and confidently. 

Photo at top by Chris Chandler

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Higher-order Thinking in the Classroom (and Why It Matters)

• Critical Thinking and Creativity

Higher-order thinking refers to critical thinking skills that go beyond simple recall and comprehension of information. It involves analyzing, evaluating, and synthesizing information to solve problems, make decisions, and create new ideas. These skills are crucial for students’ academic success and future careers.

In the classroom, fostering higher-order thinking is essential for engaging students in deeper learning. It allows them to develop a deeper understanding of concepts, think critically about complex issues, and apply their knowledge in real-life situations. By encouraging students to think critically and creatively, educators can help them become independent learners and problem solvers.

One way to promote higher-order thinking in the classroom is through project-based learning. This approach allows students to actively explore and solve real-world problems, encouraging them to think deeply, collaborate with peers, and come up with innovative solutions. By working on authentic projects, students develop their critical thinking, problem-solving, and communication skills.

Another effective strategy is questioning techniques. Educators can ask open-ended and thought-provoking questions to stimulate students’ thinking and encourage them to analyze and evaluate information. By challenging their assumptions and asking them to justify their answers, teachers can help students develop higher-order thinking skills.

Technology can also play a significant role in promoting higher-order thinking. Using educational apps, online resources, and interactive simulations, students can engage in complex problem-solving activities, explore multiple perspectives, and develop their analytical and creative thinking skills. Moreover, technology provides opportunities for collaboration and global connections, enabling students to learn from diverse perspectives and solve real-world problems collectively.

In conclusion, higher-order thinking skills are essential for students’ academic and future success. By incorporating strategies such as project-based learning, questioning techniques, and the use of technology, educators can foster these skills in the classroom. Through these approaches, students can develop critical thinking, problem-solving, and creativity skills that will serve them well in their academic and professional lives.

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• Resume and Cover Letter

Higher Order Thinking Explained

10 min read · Updated on July 03, 2023

Do you have the higher order thinking skills today's employers are looking for?

In a competitive labor market, it's important to leverage every advantage you have to achieve your career goals. To do that, it's vital to understand the skills and traits that employers prioritize when they're hiring new talent and make sure that your resume conveys those abilities and characteristics to hiring managers. For example, consider the important role that higher order thinking skills play in an economy that's increasingly knowledge-based. Do you have those skills?

In this post, we'll explore higher order learning and thinking and examine why these skills are so critical for many of today's knowledge-focused jobs. We'll also provide some examples of higher order thinking skills and offer some tips to help you to convey those abilities in your resume.

What is higher order thinking?

Higher order thought processes use thinking skills that go beyond simple memorization, repetition, observation, and other lower level thought processes. They include more advanced cognition like the ability to interpret data, draw inferences from available facts, recognize logical connections between concepts, and solve problems.

People who possess these higher order thinking skills are typically quick learners, effective decision makers, and adept at creating new ideas and solutions. Higher level thinking can enable you to understand the world around you, categorize and manipulate facts and information you encounter, and apply that data in meaningful ways as you solve challenges and make decisions. As a result, this type of thinking can be an important asset in school, work, and throughout your life.

Why do higher order thought processes matter to employers?

To appreciate just how important these skills can be in your career, it's helpful to consider why so many employers look for candidates with this type of thinking. Here are just a few of the many reasons why an employer would place a premium value on your ability to think at a higher level.

Higher order thinking is critical for the modern economy

The information age is here to stay and that means that new technologies and systems are continually being introduced in nearly every area of the economy. Employees need to be able to quickly adapt to new technologies and processes if they want to provide real value to their employers. As the economy continues to evolve, employers are likely to accelerate their search for workers who have the ability to analyze information, understand the connections between seemingly different concepts, and apply that  knowledge to create valuable solutions in the workplace.

Higher level thought drives innovation

These thinking skills are absolutely essential for all forms of innovation – and employers will always need people who can create new ideas and solutions. Companies rely on creative employees to ensure that they remain innovative and competitive in the marketplace. Workers who can engage in higher level thinking will continue to be in high demand, due to their ability to generate and assess new ideas, test theories, and adapt their ideas to ensure that they meet the company's needs.

Higher order thought processes enable self-evaluation

It's also important for today's employees to have the self-awareness needed to properly assess their own productivity and results in the workplace. Many of these higher order thinking skills are vital tools for self-assessment. Employees with these talents are adept at examining their work input and output, identifying areas for improvement, and finding better ways to achieve their goals - thereby improving productivity and proficiency.

Types and examples of higher order thinking skills

There are different types of higher order thinking, of course. They all involve thought processes that go beyond acquiring information – a skill that is generally considered a lower order ability. In fact, acquiring knowledge through rote memorization or any other process is just the beginning of learning and application. Once you've acquired that information, you need to actually comprehend it before your higher order thought processes come into play.

There are several main categories of higher order thinking skills. They include application of the information you've acquired,  analysis of data and facts, synthesis of ideas, and evaluation. Together, these types of higher level thinking provide the critical thinking skills you need to compete in the modern economy. Let's examine how each of these types of higher thinking skills can impact your thought processes.

Applying what you've learned

Application skills include all those abilities that enable you to apply knowledge to new situations, overcome challenges. and solve problems. The process can involve applying established rules and principles, advancing theories, and employing concepts and effective methodologies. Effective application relies on skills like:

Building on acquired knowledge to discover new ideas and information

Predicting outcomes based on acquired knowledge

Interpreting information and ideas so that you can better explain them to others

Employing knowledge in an operational environment, to effectively leverage technology, systems, or processes

Making informed decisions based on your comprehension of available information

Analyzing information

Analysis is an invaluable higher level thinking skill and crucial for critical thinking. This skill involves detailed examination of information, including breaking data down into its component parts to identify connections, root causes, and potential theories that can be explored as you search for solutions. As you analyze data, situations, and other sources of information, you need to ask the right kind of questions to fuel your analytical thinking.  Analytical skills can include:

Examination of data and its components to better understand the information

Subdividing information into smaller components

Identifying data, broad concepts, and specific ideas

Comparing information to identify unique features and similarities

Combining data and concepts to create new solutions

Synthesizing ideas and concepts

Synthesis is the ability to recognize patterns and create new combinations using smaller components of information. This skill set is a vital driver of innovation, since it often leads to the development of new products, business concepts, techniques, and processes. Your higher level thinking skills can help you to connect different ideas in ways that create new solutions or improve old products, services, and processes. Some examples of the skills used in synthesis include:

Developing existing ideas to create new efficiencies or advancements

Reconstructing ideas or things and reorganizing them in a way that enhances their functionality

Designing ideas, products, and processes

Unifying different ideas or products to construct something new

Revising old ideas, processes, products, or services to correct deficiencies and enhance performance

Evaluating and making judgments

Evaluation skills include all those abilities that help you to assess information, create theories, judge information, and validate ideas and concepts. When you use these skills, you make judgment calls about each piece of information you've analyzed, determining the value that you place on that data. That requires sound judgment and thought processes that rely on evidence and reason. The evaluation process can help you to not only assimilate data but also form your own opinion about its importance.

Some examples of this skill set include:

The ability to assign a value to a piece of information, data, or object

Supporting your evaluation with real-world evidence, facts, and analysis

Judging ideas and concepts based on available information, your interpretation of data, and sound reasoning

Reaching conclusions through analysis, inference, and critical thinking

Making informed decisions and being able to defend your conclusions

How to demonstrate higher level thinking in your resume

Of course, it's one thing to possess these higher order thinking skills. It's quite another to be able to convey them to employers without directly claiming that you're a high level thinker. That's often one of the trickiest things to achieve in a resume – showing your skills rather than just claiming that you have them. Fortunately, there are some effective techniques that you can use to ensure that your resume delivers a compelling narrative that highlights your high level thinking skills. These tips can help:

1.      Choose relevant higher order critical thinking keywords

Since you need to avoid referring to yourself as a “high order thinker,” you'll need to use keywords that describe those thinking skills in a way that hiring managers will recognize. To do this, you should include keywords that are relevant to your job role and industry, to ensure that employers can readily identify their potential value to the organization.

If you choose the right keywords and include them throughout your resume summary, work experience, and skill sections, you can effectively highlight those higher level thinking skills while also demonstrating expertise in your field. To help you in that process, we've compiled a list of higher order thinking skills that you can choose from as you select keywords for your resume:

Strategic planning

Data-driven decision-making

Risk assessment

Creative problem solving

Data interpretation

Troubleshooting

Predictive analysis

Technical solutions

Trend analysis

These are just a few of the many skills that you could include as keywords in your resume. To explore additional skills, check out our great posts,  How Do You Describe Analytical Skills on a Resume and  How to Sharpen Your Critical Thinking Skills .

2.      Highlight your high level thinking skills in your resume summary

Since your resume summary will be the first part of your resume that a hiring manager sees, it's important to make the best possible  first impression . Make sure that employers read that summary and immediately recognize your higher order thinking skills by including language that demonstrates these skills. The following example can be used as a guide to help you to craft your own personalized summary statement:

Data and evidence-driven problem solver with 8+ years of experience in data interpretation, trend analysis, and technical solutions. Dedicated leader of a 20-person technical department overseeing IT solutions for projects valued at more than $500million. Skilled decision-maker focused on effectively managing risk, cost, and cross-departmental communication to maximize organizational efficiencies, productivity, and profitability.

3.      Showcase higher level thinking in your work experience

Naturally, you'll also want to include these keywords in your work experience section as well. To do that, you simply need to cite specific examples of how you used those skills to achieve value for your employers. You can do this in the bullet point examples beneath each job listing. For example:

• Led data analysis, strategic planning, and implementation of network upgrade that improved inter-office efficiency by 27%
• Directed trend analysis team that identified key new strategies to boost customer retention by 18% year-on-year, while enhancing profitability by 7%
• Managed project to reduce product loss risk, resulting in $1.3million in cost savings over six months

4.      Include higher order thinking skills in your skill section

Be sure to include some of those key higher order thinking skills in your skill section as well. You don't need to include all of them, of course. However, adding a handful of those abilities to your skill list will help to highlight your high level thought process. As you create that section, refer back to the job description to make sure that you add any required skills too. 

5.      Don't forget to demonstrate these skills in your cover letter too

Finally, make sure that you don't forget to include these thought processes in your cover letter as well. Just cite an instance where you had to use high level thinking to complete a task or overcome a challenge. If you can, try to quantify those results with real numbers that demonstrate value for the employer.

Separate yourself from the crowd by highlighting your higher order thinking

As the economy continues to be transformed by new technologies and other innovations, employers can be expected to increasingly demand higher level thinking skills from their employees. It's vital to understand these thinking skills and how they can positively impact your performance in any job role, if you want to ensure that your resume properly conveys your high level thought processes.

Are you effectively representing your higher order thinking skills to potential employers? Find out by getting your free resume review from our team of experts today!

Recommended reading:

7 Conceptual Skills That Can Help You To Become a Better Manager

These 14 Leadership Traits Can Fuel Your Career Success

9 Soft Skills Employers Want in 2023

Related Articles:

7 Best Problem-Solving Skills for Your Resume + Examples (Update)

Guide to Writing a Great Resume with No Work Experience

How to Describe Organizational Skills When Applying for a Job

See how your resume stacks up.

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Metacognitive Strategies and Development of Critical Thinking in Higher Education

Silvia f. rivas.

1 Departamento de Psicología Básica, Psicobiología y Metodología de CC, Facultad de Psicología, Universidad de Salamanca, Salamanca, Spain

Carlos Saiz

Carlos ossa.

2 Departamento de Ciencias de la Educación, Facultad de Educación y Humanidades, Universidad del Bío-Bío, Sede Chillán, Chile

Associated Data

The original contributions presented in the study are included in the article/supplementary material; further inquiries can be directed to the corresponding author.

More and more often, we hear that higher education should foment critical thinking. The new skills focus for university teaching grants a central role to critical thinking in new study plans; however, using these skills well requires a certain degree of conscientiousness and its regulation. Metacognition therefore plays a crucial role in developing critical thinking and consists of a person being aware of their own thinking processes in order to improve them for better knowledge acquisition. Critical thinking depends on these metacognitive mechanisms functioning well, being conscious of the processes, actions, and emotions in play, and thereby having the chance to understand what has not been done well and correcting it. Even when there is evidence of the relation between metacognitive processes and critical thinking, there are still few initiatives which seek to clarify which process determines which other one, or whether there is interdependence between both. What we present in this study is therefore an intervention proposal to develop critical thinking and meta knowledge skills. In this context, Problem-Based Learning is a useful tool to develop these skills in higher education. The ARDESOS-DIAPROVE program seeks to foment critical thinking via metacognition and Problem-Based Learning methodology. It is known that learning quality improves when students apply metacognition; it is also known that effective problem-solving depends not only on critical thinking, but also on the skill of realization, and of cognitive and non-cognitive regulation. The study presented hereinafter therefore has the fundamental objective of showing whether instruction in critical thinking (ARDESOS-DIAPROVE) influences students’ metacognitive processes. One consequence of this is that critical thinking improves with the use of metacognition. The sample was comprised of first-year psychology students at Public University of the North of Spain who were undergoing the aforementioned program; PENCRISAL was used to evaluate critical thinking skills and the Metacognitive Activities Inventory (MAI) for evaluating metacognition. We expected an increase in critical thinking scores and metacognition following this intervention. As a conclusion, we indicate actions to incentivize metacognitive work among participants, both individually via reflective questions and decision diagrams, and at the interactional level with dialogues and reflective debates which strengthen critical thinking.

Introduction

One of the principal objectives which education must cover is helping our students become autonomous and effective. Students’ ability to use strategies which help them direct their motivation toward action in the direction of the meta-proposal is a central aspect to keep at the front of our minds when considering education. This is where metacognition comes into play—knowledge about knowledge itself, a component which is in charge of directing, monitoring, regulating, organizing, and planning our skills in a helpful way, once these have come into operation. Metacognition helps form autonomous students, increasing consciousness about their own cognitive processes and their self-regulation so that they can regulate their own learning and transfer it to any area of their lives. As we see, it is a conscious activity of high-level thinking which allows us to look into and reflect upon how we learn and to control our own strategies and learning processes. We must therefore approach a problem which is increasing in our time, that of learning and knowledge from the perspective of active participation by students. To achieve these objectives of “learning to learn” we must use adequate cognitive learning strategies, among which we can highlight those oriented toward self-learning, developing metacognitive strategies, and critical thinking.

Metacognition is one of the research areas, which has contributed the most to the formation of the new conceptions of learning and teaching. In this sense, it has advanced within the constructivist conceptions of learning, which have attributed an increasing role to student consciousness and to the regulation which they exercise over their own learning ( Glaser, 1994 ).

Metacognition was initially introduced by John Flavell in the early 1970s. He affirmed that metacognition, on one side, refers to “the knowledge which one has about his own cognitive processes products, or any other matter related with them” and on the other, “to the active supervision and consequent regulation and organization of these processes in relation with the objects or cognitive data upon which they act” ( Flavell, 1976 ; p. 232). Based on this, we can differentiate two components of metacognition: one of a declarative nature, which is metacognitive knowledge, referring to knowledge of the person and the task, and another of a procedural nature, which is metacognitive control or self-regulated learning, which is always directed toward a goal and controlled by the learner.

Different authors have pointed out that metacognition presents these areas of thought or skills, aimed knowledge or toward the regulation of thought and action, mainly proposing a binary organization in which attentional processes are oriented, on occasions, toward an object or subject, and the other hand, toward to interact with objects and/or subjects ( Drigas and Mitsea, 2021 ). However, it is possible to understand metacognition from another approach that establishes more levels of use of metacognitive thinking to promote knowledge, awareness, and intelligence, known as the eight pillars of metacognition model ( Drigas and Mitsea, 2020 ). These pillars allow thought to promote the use of deep knowledge, cognitive processes, self-regulation, functional adaptation to society, pattern recognition and operations, and even meaningful memorization ( Drigas and Mitsea, 2020 ).

In addition to the above, Drigas and Mitsea’s model establishes different levels where metacognition could be used, in a complex sequence from stimuli to transcendental ideas, in which each of the pillars could manifest a different facet of the process metacognitive, thus establishing a dialectical and integrative approach to learning and knowledge, allowing it to be understood as an evolutionary and complex process in stages ( Drigas and Mitsea, 2021 ).

All this clarifies the importance of and need for metacognition, not only in education but also in our modern society, since this need to “teach how to learn” and the capacity to “learn how to learn” in order to achieve autonomous learning and transfer it to any area of our lives will let us face problems more successfully. This becomes a relevant challenge, especially today where it is required to have a broad view regarding reflection and consciousness, and to transcend simplistic and reductionist models that seek to center the problem of knowledge only around the neurobiological or the phenomenological scope ( Sattin et al., 2021 ).

Critical thinking depends largely on these mechanisms functioning well and being conscious of the processes used, since this gives us the opportunity to understand what has not been done well and correct it in the future. Consciousness for critical thinking would imply a continuous process of reuse of thought, in escalations that allow thinking to be oriented both toward the objects of the world and toward the subjective interior, allowing to determine the ideas that give greater security to the person, and in that perspective, the metacognitive process, represents this use of Awareness, also allowing the generation of an identity of knowing being ( Drigas and Mitsea, 2021 ).

We know that thinking critically involves reasoning and deciding to effectively solve a problem or reach goals. However, effective use of these skills requires a certain degree of consciousness and regulation of them. The ARDESOS-DIAPROVE program seeks precisely to foment critical thinking, in part, via metacognition ( Saiz and Rivas, 2011 , 2012 , 2016 ).

However, it is not only centered on developing cognitive components, as this would be an important limitation. Since the 1990s, it has been known that non-cognitive components play a crucial role in developing critical thinking. However, there are few studies focusing on this relation. This intervention therefore considers both dimensions, where metacognitive processes play an essential role by providing evaluation and control mechanisms over the cognitive dimension.

Metacognition and Critical Thinking

Critical Thinking is a concept without a firm consensus, as there have been and still are varying conceptions regarding it. Its nature is so complex that it is hard to synthesize all its aspects in a single definition. While there are numerous conceptions about critical thinking, it is necessary to be precise about which definition we will use. We understand that “ critical thinking is a knowledge-seeking process via reasoning skills to solve problems and make decisions which allows us to more effectively achieve our desired results” ( Saiz and Rivas, 2008 , p. 131). Thinking effectively is desirable in all areas of individual and collective action. Currently, the background of the present field of critical thinking is also based in argumentation. Reasoning is used as the fundamental basis for all activities labeled as thinking. In a way, thinking cannot easily be decoupled from reasoning, at least if our understanding of it is “deriving something from another thing.” Inference or judgment is what we essentially find behind the concept of thinking. The question, though, is whether it can be affirmed that thinking is only reasoning. Some defend this concept ( Johnson, 2008 ), while others believe the opposite, that solving problems and making decisions are activities which also form part of thinking processes ( Halpern, 2003 ; Halpern and Dunn, 2021 , 2022 ). To move forward in this sense, we will return to our previous definition. In that definition, we have specified intellectual activity with a goal intrinsic to all mental processes, namely, seeking knowledge. Achieving our ends depends not only on the intellectual dimension, as we may need our motor or perceptive activities, so it contributes little to affirm that critical thinking allows us to achieve our objectives as we can also achieve them by doing other activities. It is important for us to make an effort to identify the mental processes responsible for thinking and distinguish them from other things.

Normally, we think to solve our problems. This is the second important activity of thought. A problem can be solved by reasoning, but also by planning course of action or selecting the best strategy for the situation. Apart from reasoning, we must therefore also make decisions to resolve difficulties. Choosing is one of the most frequent and important activities which we do. Because of this, we prefer to give it the leading role it deserves in a definition of thinking. Solving problems demands multiple intellectual activities, including reasoning, deciding, planning, etc. The final characteristic goes beyond the mechanisms peculiar to inference. What can be seen at the moment of delineating what it means to think effectively is that concepts are grouped together which go beyond the nuclear ideas of what has to do with inferring or reasoning. The majority of theoreticians in the field ( APA, 1990 ; Ennis, 1996 ; Halpern, 1998 , 2003 ; Paul and Elder, 2001 ; Facione, 2011 ; Halpern and Dunn, 2021 , 2022 ) consider that, in order to carry out this type of thinking effectively, apart from having this skill set, the intervention of other types of components is necessary, such as metacognition and motivation. This is why we consider it necessary to speak about the components of critical thinking, as we can see in Figure 1 :

Components of critical thinking ( Saiz, 2020 ).

In the nature of thinking, there are two types of components: the cognitive and the non-cognitive. The former include perception, learning, and memory processes. Learning is any knowledge acquisition mechanism, the most important of which is thinking. The latter refer to motivation and interests (attitudes tend to be understood as dispositions, inclinations…something close to motives); with metacognition remaining as a process which shares cognitive and non-cognitive aspects as it incorporates aspects of both judgment (evaluation) and disposition (control/efficiency) about thoughts ( Azevedo, 2020 ; Shekhar and Rahnev, 2021 ). Both the cognitive and non-cognitive components are essential to improve critical thinking, as one component is incomplete without the other, that is, neither cognitive skills nor dispositions on their own suffice to train a person to think critically. In general, relations are bidirectional, although for didactic reasons only unidirectional relations appear in Figure 1 ( Rivas et al., 2017 ). This is because learning is a dynamic process which is subject to all types of influence. For instance, if a student is motivated, they will work more and better—or at least, this is what is hoped for. If they can achieve good test scores as well, it can be supposed that motivation is reinforced, so that they will continue existing behaviors in the same direction that is, working hard and well on their studies. This latter point appears to arise at least because of an adjustment between expectations and reality which the student achieves thanks to metacognition, which allows them to effectively attribute their achievements to their efforts ( Ugartetxea, 2001 ).

Metacognition, which is our interest in this paper, should also have bidirectional relations with critical thinking. Metacognition tends to be understood as the degree of consciousness which we have about our own mental processes and similar to the capacity for self-regulation, that is, planning and organization ( Mayor et al., 1993 ). We observe that these two ideas have very different natures. The former is simpler, being the degree of consciousness which we reach about an internal mechanism or process. The latter is a less precise idea, since everything which has to do with self-regulation is hard to differentiate from a way of understanding motivation, such as the entire tradition of intrinsic motivation and self-determination from Deci, his collaborators, and other authors of this focus (see, e.g., Deci and Ryan, 1985 ; Ryan and Deci, 2000 ). The important thing is to emphasize the executive dimension of metacognition, more than the degree of consciousness, for practical reasons. It can be expected that this dimension has a greater influence on the learning process than that of consciousness, although there is little doubt that we have to establish both as necessary and sufficient conditions. However, the data must speak in this regard. Due to all of this, and as we shall see hereinafter, the intervention designed incorporates both components to improve critical thinking skills.

We can observe, though, that the basic core of critical thinking continues to be topics related to skills, in our case, reasoning, problem-solving, and decision-making. The fact that we incorporate concepts of another nature, such as motivation, in a description of critical thinking is justified because it has been proven that, when speaking about critical thinking, the fact of centering solely on skills does not allow for fully gathering its complexity. The purpose of the schematic in Figure 2 is to provide conceptual clarity to the adjective “critical” in the expression critical thinking . If we understand critical to refer to effective , we should also consider that effectiveness is not, as previously mentioned, solely achieved with skills. They must be joined together with other mechanisms during different moments. Intellectual skills alone cannot achieve the effectiveness assumed within the term “critical.” First, for said skills to get underway, we must want to do so. Motivation therefore comes into play before skills and puts them into operation. For its part, metacognition allows us to take advantage of directing, organizing, and planning our skills and act once they have begun to work. Motivation thus activates our abilities, while metacognition lets them be more effective. The final objective should always be to gain proper knowledge of reality to resolve our problems.

Purpose of critical thinking ( Saiz, 2020 , p.27).

We consider that the fact of referring to components of critical thinking while differentiating the skills of motivation and metacognition aids with the conceptual clarification we seek. On one side, we specify the skills which we discuss, and on another, we mention which other components are related to, and even overlap with them. We must be conscious of how difficult it is to find “pure” mental processes. Planning a course of action, an essential trait of metacognition, demands reflection, prediction, choice, comparison, and evaluation… And this, evidently, is thinking. The different levels or dimensions of our mental activity must be related and integrated. Our aim is to be able to identify what is substantial in thinking to know what we are able to improve and evaluate.

It is widely known that for our personal and professional functioning, thinking is necessary and useful. When we want to change a situation or gain something, all our mental mechanisms go into motion. We perceive the situation, identify relevant aspects of the problem, analyze all the available information, and appraise everything we analyze. We make judgments about the most relevant matters, decide about the options or pathways for resolution, execute the plan, obtain results, evaluate the results, estimate whether we have achieved our purpose and, according to the level of satisfaction following this estimation, consider our course of action good, or not.

The topic we must pose now is what things are teachable. It is useful to specify that what is acquired is clearly cognitive and some of the non-cognitive, because motivation can be stimulated or promoted, but not taught. The concepts of knowledge and wisdom are its basis. Mental representation and knowledge only become wisdom when we can apply it to reality, when we take it out of our mind and adequately situate it in the world. For our teaching purposes, we only have to take a position about whether knowledge is what makes critical thinking develop, or vice versa. For us, skills must be directly taught, and dominion is secondary. Up to now, we have established the components of critical thinking, but these elements still have to be interrelated properly. What we normally find are skills or components placed side by side or overlapping, but not the ways in which they influence each other. Lipman (2003) may have developed the most complete theory of critical and creative thinking, along Paul and his group, in second place, with their universal thought structures ( Paul and Elder, 2006 ). However, a proposal for the relation between the elements is lacking.

To try to explain the relation between the components of thought, we will use Figure 2 as an aid.

The ultimate goal of critical thinking is change that is, passing from one state of wellbeing into a better state. This change is only the fruit of results, which must be the best. Effectiveness is simple achieving our goals in the best way possible. There are many possible results, but for our ends, there are always some which are better than others. Our position must be for effectiveness, the best response, the best solution. Reaching a goal is resolving or achieving something, and for this, we have mechanisms available which tell us which are the best course of action. Making decisions and solving problems are fundamental skills which are mutually interrelated. Decision strategies come before a solution. Choosing a course of action always comes before its execution, so it is easy to understand that decisions contribute to solutions.

Decisions must not come before reflection, although this often can and does happen. As we have already mentioned, the fundamental skills of critical thinking, in most cases, have been reduced to reasoning, and to a certain degree, this is justified. There is an entire important epistemological current behind this, within which the theory of argumentation makes no distinction, at least syntactically, between argumentation and explanation. However, for us this distinction is essential, especially in practice ( Saiz, 2020 ). We will only center on an essential difference for our purpose. Argumentation may have to do with values and realities, but explanation only has to do with the latter. We can argue about beliefs, convictions, and facts, but we can only explain realities. Faced with an explanation of reality, any argumentation would be secondary. Thus, explanation will always be the central skill in critical thinking.

The change which is sought is always expressed in reality. Problems always are manifested and resolved with actions, and these are always a reality. An argument about realities aids in explaining them. An argument about values upholds a belief or a conviction. However, beliefs always influence behavior; thus, indirectly, the argument winds up being about realities. One may argue, for example, only for or against the death penalty, and reach the conviction that it is good or bad and ultimately take a position for or against allowing it. This is why we say that deciding always comes before resolving; furthermore, resolution always means deciding about something in a particular direction—it always means choosing and taking an option; furthermore, deciding is often only from two possibilities, the better or that which is not better, or which is not as good. Decisions are made based on the best option possible of all those which can be presented. Resolution is a dichotomy. Since our basic end lies within reality, explanation must be constituted as the basic pillar to produce change. Argumentation must therefore be at the service of causality (explanation), and both must be in the service of solid decisions leading us to the best solution or change of situation. We now believe that the relation established in Figure 2 can be better understood. From this relation, we propose that thinking critically means reaching the best explanation for an event, phenomenon, or problem in order to know how to effectively resolve it ( Saiz, 2017 , p.19). This idea, to our judgment, is the best summary of the nature of critical thinking. It clarifies details and makes explicit the components of critical thinking.

Classroom Activities to Develop Metacognition

We will present a set of strategies to promote metacognitive work in the classroom in this section, aimed at improving critical thinking skills. These strategies can be applied both at the university level and the secondary school level; we will thus focus on these two levels, although metacognitive strategies can be worked on from an earlier age ( Jaramillo and Osses, 2012 ; Tamayo-Alzate et al., 2019 ) and some authors have indicated that psychological maturity has a greater impact on effectively achieving metacognition ( Sastre-Riba, 2012 ; García et al., 2016 ).

At the individual level, metacognition can be worked on via applying questions aimed at the relevant tasks which must be undertaken regarding a task (meta-knowledge questions), for example:

• Do I know how much I know about this subject?
• Do I have clear instructions and know what action is expected from me?
• How much time do I have?
• Am I covering the proper and necessary subjects, or is there anything important left out?
• How do I know that my work is right?
• Have I covered every point of the rubric for the work to gain a good grade or a sufficient level?

These reflective questions facilitate supervising knowledge level, resource use, and the final product achieved, so that the decisions taken for said activities are the best and excellent learning results are achieved.

Graphs or decision diagrams can also be used to aid in organizing these questions during the different phases of executing a task (planning, progress, and final evaluation), which is clearly linked with the knowledge and control processes of metacognition ( Mateos, 2001 ). These diagrams are more complex and elaborate strategies than the questions, but are effective when monitoring the steps considered in the activity ( Ossa et al., 2016 ). Decision diagrams begin from a question or task, detailing the principal steps to take, and associating an alternative (YES or NO) to each step, which leads to the next step whenever the decision is affirmative, or to improve or go further into the step taken if the decision is negative.

Finally, we can work on thinking aloud, a strategy which facilitates making the thoughts explicit and conscious, allowing us to monitor their knowledge, decisions, and actions to promote conscious planning, supervision and evaluation ( Ávila et al., 2017 ; Dahik et al., 2019 ). For example:

• While asking a question, the student thinks aloud: I am having problems with this part of the task, and I may have to ask the teacher to know whether I am right.

Thinking aloud can be done individually or in pairs, allowing for active monitoring of decisions and questions arising from cognitive and procedural work done by the student.

Apart from the preceding strategies, it is also possible to fortify metacognitive development via personal interactions based on dialogue between both the students themselves and between the teacher and individual students. One initial strategy, similar to thinking out loud in pairs, is reflective dialogue between teacher and student, a technique which allows for exchanging deep questions and answers, where the student becomes conscious of their knowledge and practice thanks to dialogical interventions by the teacher ( Urdaneta, 2014 ).

Reflective dialogue can also be done via reflective feedback implemented by the teacher for the students to learn by themselves about the positive and negative aspects of their performance on a task.

Finally, another activity based on dialogue and interaction is related to metacognitive argumentation ( Sánchez-Castaño et al., 2015 ), a strategy which uses argumentative resources to establish a valid argumentative structure to facilitate responding to a question or applying it to a debate. While argumentative analysis is based on logic and the search for solid reasons, these can have higher or lower confidence and reliability as a function of the data which they provide. Thus, if a reflective argumentative process is performed, via questioning reasons or identifying counterarguments, there is more depth and density in the argumentative structure, achieving greater confidence and validity.

We can note that metacognition development strategies are based on reflective capacity, which allow thought to repeatedly review information and decisions to consider, without immediately taking sides or being carried away by superficial or biased ideas or data. Critical thought benefits strongly from applying this reflective process, which guides both data management and cognitive process use. These strategies can also be developed in various formats (written, graphic, oral, individual, and dialogical), providing teachers a wide range of tools to strengthen learning and thinking.

Metacognitive Strategies to Improve Critical Thinking

In this section, we will describe the fundamental metacognitive strategies addressed in our critical thinking skills development program ARDESOS-DIAPROVE.

First, one of the active learning methodologies applied is Problem-Based Learning (PBL). This pedagogical strategy is student-centered and encourages autonomous and participative learning, orienting students toward more active and decisive learning. In PBL each situation must be approached as a problem-solving task, making it necessary to investigate, understand, interpret, reason, decide, and resolve. It is presented as a methodology which facilitates joint knowledge acquisition and skill learning. It is also good for working on daily problems via relevant situations, considerably reducing the distance between learning context and personal/professional life and aiding the connection between theory and practice, which promote the highly desired transference. It favors organization and the capacity to decide about problem-solving, which also improves performance and knowledge about the students’ own learning processes. Because of all this, this methodology aids in reflection and analysis processes, which in turn promotes metacognitive skill development.

The procedure which we carried out in the classroom with all the activities is based on the philosophy of gradual learning control transference ( Mateos, 2001 ). During instruction, the teacher takes on the role of model and guide for students’ cognitive and metacognitive activity, gradually bringing them into participating in an increasing level of competency, and slowly withdrawing support in order to attain control over the students’ learning process. This methodology develops in four phases: (1) explicit instruction, where the teacher directly explains the skills which will be worked on; (2) guided practice, where the teacher acts as a collaborator to guide and aid students in self-regulation; and (3) cooperative practice, where cooperative group work facilitates interaction with a peer group collaborating to resolve the problem. By explaining, elaborating, and justifying their own points of view and alternative solutions, greater consciousness, reflection, and control over their own cognitive processes is promoted. Finally, (4) individual practice is what allows students to place their learning into practice in individual evaluation tasks.

Regarding the tasks, it is important to highlight that the activities must be aimed not only at acquiring declarative knowledge, but also at procedural knowledge. The objective of practical tasks, apart from developing fundamental knowledge, is to develop CT skills among students in both comprehension and expression in order to favor their learning and its transference. The problems used must be common situations, close to our students’ reality. The important thing in our task of teaching critical thinking is its usefulness to our students, which can only be achieved during application since we only know something when we are capable of applying it. We are not interested in students merely developing critical skills; they must also be able to generalize their intellectual skills, for which they must perceive them as useful in order to want to acquire them. Finally, they will have to actively participate to apply them to solving problems. Furthermore, if we study the different ways of reasoning without context, via overly academic problems, their application to the personal sphere becomes impossible, leading them to be considered hardly useful. This makes it important to contextualize skills within everyday problems or situations which help us get students to use them regularly and understand their usefulness.

Reflecting on how one carries things out in practice and analyzing mistakes are ways to encourage success and autonomy in learning. These self-regulation strategies are the properly metacognitive part of our study. The teacher has various resources to increase these strategies, particularly feedback oriented toward task resolution. Similarly, one of the most effective instruments to achieve it is using rubrics, a central tool for our methodology. These guides, used in student performance evaluations, describe the specific characteristics of a task at various performance levels, in order to clarify expectations for students’ work, evaluate their execution, and facilitate feedback. This type of technique also allows students to direct their own activity. We use them with this double goal in mind; on the one hand, they aid students in carrying out tasks, since they help divide the complex tasks they have to do into simpler jobs, and on the other, they help evaluate the task. Rubrics guide students in the skills and knowledge they need to acquire as well as facilitating self-evaluation, thereby favoring responsibility in their learning. Task rubrics are also the guide for evaluation which teachers carry out in classrooms, where they specify, review, and correctly resolve the tasks which students do according to the rubric criteria. Providing complete feedback to students is a crucial aspect for the learning process. Thus, in all sessions time is dedicated to carrying it out. This is what will allow them to move ahead in self-regulated skill learning.

According to what we have seen, there is a wide range of positions when it comes to defining critical thinking. However, there is consensus in the fact that critical thinking involves cognitive, attitudinal, and metacognitive components, which together favor proper performance in critical thinking ( Ennis, 1987 ; Facione, 1990 ). This important relation between metacognition and critical thinking has been widely studied in the literature ( Berardi-Coletta et al., 1995 ; Antonietti et al., 2000 ; Kuhn and Dean, 2004 ; Black, 2005 ; Coutinho et al., 2005 ; Orion and Kali, 2005 ; Schroyens, 2005 ; Akama, 2006 ; Choy and Cheah, 2009 ; Magno, 2010 ; Arslan, 2014 ) although not always in an applied way. Field studies indicate the existence of relations between teaching metacognitive strategies and progress in students’ higher-order thinking processes ( Schraw, 1998 ; Kramarski et al., 2002 ; Van der Stel and Veenman, 2010 ). Metacognition is thus considered one of the most relevant predictors of achieving a complex higher-order thought process.

Along the same lines, different studies show the importance of developing metacognitive skills among students as it is related not only with developing critical thinking, but also with academic achievement and self-regulated learning ( Klimenko and Alvares, 2009 ; Magno, 2010 ; Doganay and Demir, 2011 ; Özsoy, 2011 ). Klimenko and Alvares (2009) indicated that one way for students to acquire necessary tools to encourage autonomous learning is making cognitive and metacognitive strategies explicit and well-used and that teachers’ role is to be mediators and guides. Inspite of this evidence, there is less research about the use of metacognitive strategies in encouraging critical thinking. The principal reason is probably that it is methodologically difficult to gather direct data about active metacognitive processes which are complex by nature. Self-reporting is also still very common in metacognition evaluation, and there are few studies which have included objective measurements aiding in methodological precision for evaluating metacognition.

However, in recent years, greater importance has been assigned to teaching metacognitive skills in the educational system, as they aid students in developing higher-order thinking processes and improving their academic success ( Flavell, 2004 ; Larkin, 2009 ). Because of this, classrooms have seen teaching and learning strategies emphasizing metacognitive knowledge and regulation. Returning to our objective, which is to improve critical thinking via the ARDESOS-DIAPROVE program, we have achieved our goal in an acceptable way ( Saiz and Rivas, 2011 , 2012 , 2016 ).

However, we need to know which specific factors contribute to this improvement. We have covered significant ground through different studies, one of which we present here. In this one, we attempt to find out the role of metacognition in critical thinking. This is the central objective of the study. Our program includes motivational and metacognitive variables. Therefore, we seek to find out whether metacognition improves after this instruction program focused on metacognition. Therefore, our hypothesis is simple: we expect that the lesson will improve our students’ metacognition. The idea is to know whether applying metacognition helps us achieve improved critical thinking and whether after this change metaknowledge itself improves. In other words, improved critical thinking performance will make us think better about thinking processes themselves. If this can be improved, we can expect that in the future it will have a greater influence on critical thinking. The idea is to be able to demonstrate that applying specifically metacognitive techniques, the processes themselves will subsequently improve in quality and therefore contribute better volume and quality to reasoning tasks, decision-making and problem-solving.

Materials and Methods

Participants.

In the present study, we used a sample of 89 students in a first-year psychology course at Public University of the North of Spain. 82% (73) were women, and the other 18% (16) were men. Participants’ median age was 18.93 ( SD 1.744).

Instruments

Critical thinking test.

To measure critical thinking skills, we applied the PENCRISAL test ( Saiz and Rivas, 2008 ; Rivas and Saiz, 2012 ). The PENCRISAL is a battery consisting of 35 production problem situations with an open-answer format, composed of five factors: Deductive Reasoning , Inductive Reasoning , Practical Reasoning , Decision-Making , and Problem-Solving , with seven items per factor. Items for each factor gather the most representative structures of fundamental critical thinking skills.

The items’ format is open, so that the person has to answer a concrete question, adding a justification for the reasons behind their answer. Because of this, there are standardized correction criteria assigning values between 0 and 2 points as a function of answer quality. This test offers us a total score of critical thinking skills and another five scores referring to the five factors. The value range is located between 0 and 72 points as a maximum limit for total test scoring, and between 0 and 14 for each of the five scales. The reliability measures present adequate precision levels according to the scoring procedures, with the lowest Cronbach’s alpha values at 0.632, and the test–retest correlation at 0.786 ( Rivas and Saiz, 2012 ). PENCRISAL administration was done over the Internet via the evaluation platform SelectSurvey.NET V5: http://24.selectsurvey.net/pensamiento-critico/Login.aspx .

Metacognitive Skill Inventory

Metacognitive skill evaluation was done via the metacognitive awareness inventory from Schraw and Dennison (1994) (MAI; Huertas Bustos et al., 2014 ). This questionnaire has 52 Likert scale-type items with five points. The items are distributed in two general dimensions: cognitive knowledge (C) and regulation of cognition (R). This provides ample coverage for the two aforementioned ideas about metaknowledge. There are also eight defined subcategories within each general dimension. For C, these are: declarative knowledge (DK), procedural knowledge (PK), and conditional knowledge (CK). In R, we find: organization (O), monitoring (M), and evaluation (E). This instrument comprehensively, and fairly clearly, brings together essential aspects of metacognition. On one side, there is the level of consciousness, containing types of knowledge—declarative, procedural, and strategic. On the other, it considers everything important in the processes of self-regulation, planning, organization, direction or control (monitoring), adjustment (troubleshooting), and considering the results achieved (evaluation). It provides a very complete vision of everything important in this dimension. Cronbach’s alpha for this instrument is 0.94, showing good internal consistency.

Intervention Program

As previously mentioned, in this study, we applied the third version of the ARDESOS_DIAPROVE program ( Saiz and Rivas, 2016 ; Saiz, 2020 ), with the objective of improving thinking skills. This program is centered on directly teaching the skills which we consider essential to develop critical thinking and for proper performance in our daily affairs. For this, we must use reasoning and good problem-solving and decision-making strategies, with one of the most fundamental parts of our intervention being the use of everyday situations to develop these abilities.

DIAPROVE methodology incorporates three new and essential aspects: developing observation, the combined use of facts and deduction, and effective management of de-confirmation procedures, or discarding hypotheses. These are the foundation of our teaching, which requires specific teaching–learning techniques.

The intervention took place over 16 weeks and is designed to be applied in classrooms over a timeframe of 55–60 h. The program is applied in classes of around 30–35 students divided into groups of four for classwork in collaborative groups, and organized into six activity blocks: (1) nature of critical thinking, (2) problem-solving and effectiveness, (3) explanation and causality, (4) deduction and explanation, (5) argumentation and deduction, and (6) problem-solving and decision-making. These blocks are assembled maintaining homogeneity, facilitating a global integrated skill focus which helps form comprehension and use of the different structures in any situation as well as a greater degree of ability within the domain of each skill.

Our program made an integrated use of problem-based learning (PBL) and cooperative learning (CL) as didactic teaching and learning strategies in the critical thinking program. These methodologies jointly exert a positive influence on the students, allowing them to participate more actively in the learning process, achieve better results in contextualizing content and developing skills and abilities for problem-solving, and improve motivation.

To carry out our methodology in the classrooms, we have designed a teaching system aligned with these directives. Two types of tasks are done: (1) comprehension and (2) production. The materials we used to carry out these activities are the same for all the program blocks. One key element in our aim of teaching how to think critically must be its usefulness to our students, which is only achieved through application. This makes it important to contextualize reasoning types within common situations or problems, aiding students to use them regularly and understand their usefulness. Our intention with the materials we use is to face the problems of transference, usefulness, integrated skills, and how to produce these things. Accordingly, the materials used for the tasks are: (1) common situations and (2) professional/personal problems.

The tasks which the students perform take place over a week. They work in cooperative groups in class, and then review, correct, and clarify together, promoting reflection on their achievements and errors, which fortifies metacognition. Students get the necessary feedback on the work performed which will help them progressively acquire fundamental procedural contents. Our goal here is that students become conscious of their own thought processes in order to improve them. In this way, via the dialogue achieved between teachers and students as well as between the students themselves in their cooperative work, metacognition is developed. For conscious performance of tasks, the students will receive rubrics for each and every task to guide them in their completion.

Application of the ARDESOS-DIAPROVE program was done across a semester in the Psychology Department of the Public University of the North of Spain. One week before teaching began; critical thinking and metacognition evaluations were done. This was also done 1 week after the intervention ended, in order to gather the second measurement for PENCRISAL and MAI. The timelapse between the pre-treatment and post-treatment measurements was 4 months. The intervention was done by instructors with training and good experience in the program.

To test our objective, we used a quasi-experimental pre-post design with repeated measurements.

Statistical Analysis

For statistical analysis, we used the IBM SPSS Statistics 26 statistical packet. The statistical tools and techniques used were: frequency and percentage tables for qualitative variables, exploratory and descriptive analysis of quantitative variables with a goodness of fit test to the normal Gaussian model, habitual descriptive statistics (median, SD, etc.) for numerical variables, and Student’s t -tests for significance of difference.

To begin, a descriptive analysis of the study variables was carried out. Tables 1 , ​ ,2 2 present the summary of descriptions for the scores obtained by students in the sample, as well as the asymmetry and kurtosis coefficients for their distribution.

Description of critical thinking measurement (PENCRISAL).

TOT_PRE, PENCRISAL pre-test; RD_PRE, Deductive reasoning pre-test; RI_PRE, Inductive reasoning pre-test; RP_PRE, Practical reasoning pre-test; TD_PRE, Decision making pre-test; SP_PRE, Problem solving pre-test; TOT_POST, PENCRISAL post-test; RD_ POST, Deductive reasoning post-test; RI_ POST, Inductive reasoning post-test; RP_ POST, Practical reasoning post-test; TD_ POST, Decision making post-test; SP_ POST, Problem solving post-test; Min, minimum, Max, maximum, Asym, asymmetry; and Kurt, kurtosis.

Description of metacognition measurement (MAI).

TOT_MAI_PRE, MAI pre-test; Decla_PRE, Declarative pre-test; Proce_PRE, Procedural pre-test; Condi_PRE, Conditional pre-test; CONO_PRE, Knowledge pre-test; Plani_PRE, Planning pre-test; Orga_PRE, Organization pre-test; Moni_PRE, Monitoring pre-test; Depu_PRE, Troubleshooting pre-test; Eva_PRE, Evaluation pre-test; REGU_PRE, Regulation pre-test; TOT_MAI_POST, MAI post-test; Decla_ POST, Declarative post-test; Proce_ POST, Procedural post-test; Condi_ POST, Conditional post-test; CONO_ POST, Knowledge post-test; Plani_ POST, Planning post-test; Orga_POST, Organization post-test; Moni_ POST, Monitoring post-test; Depu_ POST, Troubleshooting post-test; Eva_ POST, Evaluation post-test; and REGU_ POST, Regulation post-test;

As we see in the description of all study variables, the evidence is that the majority of them adequately fit the normal model, although some present significant deviations which can be explained by sample size.

Next, to verify whether there were significant differences in the metacognition variable based on measurements before and after the intervention, we contrasted medians for samples related with Student’s t -test (see Table 3 ).

Comparison of the METAKNOWLEDGE variable as a function of PRE-POST measurements.

The results show that there are significant differences in the metaknowledge scale total and in most of its dimensions, where all the post medians for both the scale overall and for the three dimensions of the knowledge factor (declarative, procedural, and conditional) are higher than the pre-medians. However, in the cognition regulation dimension, there are only significant differences in the total and in the planning, organization, and monitoring dimensions. The medians are also greater in the post-test than the pre-test. However, the troubleshooting and evaluation dimensions do not differ significantly after intervention.

Finally, for critical thinking skills, the results show significant differences in the scale total and in the five factors regarding the measurement time, where performance medians rise after intervention (see Table 4 ).

Comparison of the CRITICAL THINKING variable as a function of PRE-POST measurements.

These results show how metacognition improves due to CT intervention, as well as how critical thinking also improves with metacognitive intervention and CT skills intervention. Thus, it improves how people think about thinking as well as about the results achieved, since metacognition supports decision-making and final evaluation about proper strategies to solve problems.

Discussion and Conclusions

The general aim of our study was to know whether a critical thinking intervention program can also influence metacognitive processes. We know that our teaching methodology improves cross-sectional skills in argumentation, explanation, decision-making, and problem-solving, but we do not know if this intervention also directly or indirectly influences metacognition. In our study, we sought to shed light on this little-known point. If we bear in mind the centrality of how we think about thinking for our cognitive machinery to function properly and reach the best results possible in the problems we face, it is hard to understand the lack of attention given to this theme in other research. Our study aimed to remedy this deficiency somewhat.

As said in the introduction, metacognition has to do with consciousness, planning, and regulation of our activities. These mechanisms, as understood by many authors, have a blended cognitive and non-cognitive nature, which is a conceptual imprecision; what is known, though, is the enormous influence they exert on fundamental thinking processes. However, there is a large knowledge gap about the factors which make metacognition itself improve. This second research lacuna is what we have partly aimed to shrink here as well with this study. Our guide has been the idea of knowing how to improve metacognition from a teaching initiative and from the improvement of fundamental critical thinking skills.

Our study has shed light in both directions, albeit in a modest way, since its design does not allow us to unequivocally discern some of the results obtained. However, we believe that the data provide relevant information to know more about existing relations between skills and metacognition, something which has seen little contrast. These results allow us to better describe these relations, guiding the design of future studies which can better discern their roles. Our data have shown that this relation is bidirectional, so that metacognition improves thinking skills and vice versa. It remains to establish a sequence of independent factors to avoid this confusion, something which the present study has aided with to be able to design future research in this area.

As the results show, total differences in almost all metaknowledge dimensions are higher after intervention; specifically, we see how in the knowledge factor the declarative, procedural, and conditional dimensions improve in post-measurements. This improvement moves in the direction we predicted. However, the cognitive regulation dimension only shows differences in the total, and in the planning, organization, and regulation dimensions. We can see how the declarative knowledge dimensions are more sensitive than the procedural ones to change, and within the latter, the dimensions over which we have more control are also more sensitive. With troubleshooting and evaluation, no changes are seen after intervention. We may interpret this lack of effects as being due to how everything referring to evaluating results is highly determined by calibration capacity, which is influenced by personality factors not considered in our study. Regarding critical thinking, we found differences in all its dimensions, with higher scores following intervention. We can tentatively state that this improved performance can be influenced not only by interventions, but also by the metacognitive improvement observed, although our study was incapable of separating these two factors, and merely established their relation.

As we know, when people think about thinking they can always increase their critical thinking performance. Being conscious of the mechanisms used in problem-solving and decision-making always contributes to improving their execution. However, we need to go into other topics to identify the specific determinants of these effects. Does performance improve because skills are metacognitively benefited? If so, how? Is it only the levels of consciousness which aid in regulating and planning execution, or do other factors also have to participate? What level of thinking skills can be beneficial for metacognition? At what skill level does this metacognitive change happen? And finally, we know that teaching is always metacognitive to the extent that it helps us know how to proceed with sufficient clarity, but does performance level modify consciousness or regulation level of our action? Do bad results paralyze metacognitive activity while good ones stimulate it? Ultimately, all of these open questions are the future implications which our current study has suggested. We believe them to be exciting and necessary challenges, which must be faced sooner rather than later. Finally, we cannot forget the implications derived from specific metacognitive instruction, as presented at the start of this study. An intervention of this type should also help us partially answer the aforementioned questions, as we cannot obviate what can be modified or changed by direct metacognition instruction.

Data Availability Statement

Ethics statement.

Ethical review and approval was not required for the study on human participants in accordance with the local legislation and institutional requirements. The patients/participants provided their written informed consent to participate in this study.

Author Contributions

SR and CS contributed to the conception and design of the study. SR organized the database, performed the statistical analysis, and wrote the first draft of the manuscript. SR, CS, and CO wrote sections of the manuscript. All authors contributed to the article and approved the submitted version.

This study was partly financed by the Project FONDECYT no. 11220056 ANID-Chile.

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Publisher’s Note

All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

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Higher-Order Thinking Skills

Adele sewell.

February 27, 2023

How can we enhance the quality of thinking in our classrooms, and what strategies can we use to promote higher-order thinking?

Sewell, A (2023, February 27). Higher-Order Thinking Skills. Retrieved from https://www.structural-learning.com/post/higher-order-thinking-skills

Defining Higher order thinking skills

Higher-order thinking skills can be traced back to Socrates and Plato , when problem-solving was linked to critical thinking . Higher-order thinking skills (HOTS) are something that has been well-researched and is something we are led to aspire to in our classrooms.

Research suggests higher-order thinking skills promote student success and achievement , giving them a wealth of transferable skills. It is often documented and evaluated in observed sessions as the questioning techniques teachers use to support learning.

However, questions are only one way to promote higher-order skills, as there are many other ways, such as debate, problem-based learning and constructing meaning from materials presented.

Higher-order thinking skills can be used in educational settings as a way to support student learning. Instructors and teachers can design instructional activities that require students to use problem-solving, critical thinking, decision making and evaluation to learn a subject more effectively.

By doing so, they can promote higher-order thinking skills that enable students to think beyond the basics and apply their learning in more meaningful ways . This could help equip students with 21st-century skills they can carry throughout their lives.

Research on higher-order thinking skills is mainly conducted through cross-sectional studies, which compare a specific group of students at different points in time to track the development of their cognitive abilities . These studies have revealed that when given the right opportunity and resources to develop their thinking skills , students demonstrate tremendous growth over a short period of time.

In this article, we will explore how fluid reasoning skills can be used to promote the acquisition of knowledge needed to understand abstract concepts in our curriculum.

Why are higher-order thinking skills important?

Higher-order thinking skills, such as convergent thinking, creative thinking, and analytical thinking, are essential for students to develop in order to succeed in today's world. The learning process in classrooms should prioritize the nurturing of these skills , as they allow students to tackle complex problems, understand abstract concepts and synthesize knowledge from various sources.

Exploratory activities that promote creative thinking, especially in problem-solving, can be particularly valuable to students. They help students to think outside the box and to develop original ideas. It encourages them to take risks and experiment with various solutions, which are skills that they can use in everyday life, as well as real-life situations.

Analytical thinking skills are also important, as they enable students to break down complex problems and to understand the underlying process concepts. This makes it easier for students to manage information and make informed decisions. These skills can also help students to better understand and interpret abstract concepts, which can be particularly challenging for some students .

In order to promote higher-order thinking skills, educators can incorporate activities that foster analytical, creative and convergent thinking. Group activities, debates and problem-solving activities are particularly effective in promoting these skills. It is also important for students to have access to a diverse range of resources and to have the opportunity to collaborate with their peers. By nurturing these critical higher-order thinking skills, students will be better prepared to tackle challenges, solve problems, and succeed in the ever-evolving world.

Promoting higher-order thinking

We seek to promote higher-order thinking skills that will enable our students to justify their ideas to themselves and others. They are essentially those of evaluation, criticality and justification that students must develop through practice.

This involves the teacher providing opportunities for debate and critical reflection. Teachers, therefore, should look to providing materials before a lesson or sourcing materials before the session to facilitate rather than teach content directly.

Higher-order thinking skills are linked to stretch, challenge, differentiation, and active learning techniques . They are also associated with Bloom's taxonomy and can therefore be related to supporting children's early development of cognitive skills. Ennis (1987) states that Bloom's analysis , synthesis and evaluation skills should be considered Higher Order skills. This is a valuable idea but can confuse the teacher by applying such categorization.

Much of the research points to higher-order skills being more incidental in the classroom rather than a thought-out strategy that promotes thinking through a problem to sustain a line of reasoning or justify their ideas.

One way we can encourage questioning that is higher order is to think before our sessions about what questions we want to ask our students based on the pre-planned content. Using this simple strategy will then support teachers to not just think on their feet with questions but think in advance of how to help thinking, allowing them to utilize their pedagogical content knowledge.

Definitions encompass constructivism principles such as fluidity of thought, complex problem solving and interacting with the world around us to develop new concepts, as Dewey (1938) advocates.

Further, Vygotsky argued that higher mental abilities could only develop through interaction with others. He, therefore, proposed that children are born with elementary cognitive skills such as memory and perception and that higher mental functions develop from these through the influence of social interactions.

Benefits of nurturing Higher Order Thinking Skills

Having a rich repertoire of thinking skills can help students express themselves more clearly. Possessing a range of thinking skills enables learners to construct deeper meaning and comprehension.

Using such tools as the Frayer model or CREATE can help to support understanding. By engaging in metacognition strategies , students will retain information and be better able to use and apply it to new situations. Developing levels of thinking beyond lower-order thinking skills is something that requires practice. Practitioners should therefore seek to find situations to support collaborative learning as, like everything, requires practice.

Suppose the course is carefully designed around student-learning outcomes , and some of those outcomes have a robust critical-thinking component. In that case, the final assessment of your student's success at achieving the outcomes will be evidence of their critical thinking ability.

Multiple-choice exams are good at detecting the key facts, but they don't go any deeper than that. Students need to use the new knowledge in productive ways to showcase their full breadth of understanding.

As Schulz ( 2016) and Resnick (2001) point out, this may have a detriment on learning as students who have not been taught a demanding, challenging, thinking curriculum do poorly on tests of reasoning or problem. Heong (2012) cautions us that students with weak thinking skills cannot effectively perform cognitive and metacognitive-based tasks . They are therefore placed at a disadvantage in the education system.

Higher-order thinking skills are an approach in education that separates critical thinking techniques from low-order learning approaches, such as rote and memorisation. By promoting higher-order thinking, students are supported to understand, categorise, manipulate, infer, connect and apply information.

How can higher-order thinking skills be promoted?

Teachers who plan to teach and extend students' higher-order thinking skills promote growth for their students . Higher-order thinking is promoted through a range of skills :

Transfer of knowledge - the student's ability to apply knowledge and skills to new contexts (for example, a student in learning about fractions applied his/her knowledge to a real-world scenario)

Critical thinking - the ability to reason, reflect, and decide what to believe or do next through analysis of text, reports and debate. Instead of taking things at face value, a critical thinker uses logic and reason to evaluate the information.

Problem-solving - meeting a goal that cannot be met with a memorised solution (Brookhart, 2010, 2011). This will involve planning through cooperative learning techniques. This technique requires a leap of faith in that students should control the planning, direction and organization of a task or problem.

Create something new - we are going beyond receiving and evaluating knowledge. We move up to generate new knowledge based on our experiences and intellect.

Lateral thinking – Lateral thinkers take alternative routes to develop under-utilized or creative solutions to problems. ‘Lateral’ means to approach from the side rather than head-on.

Divergent thinking – Divergent thinking refers to the process of generating multiple possible ideas from one question. It is common when we engage in brainstorming, and it allows people to find creative solutions to problems.

Convergent thinking – Convergent thinking is about gathering facts to come up with an answer or solution.

Counterfactual thinking – Counterfactual thinking involves asking “what if?” questions in order to think of alternatives that may have happened if there were small changes made here and there. It is useful for reflective thinking and self-improvement.

Synthesizing – When we synthesize information, we gather information from multiple sources, identifying trends and themes and bringing it together into one review or evaluation of the knowledge base.

Invention – Invention occurs when something entirely new is created for the first time. For this to occur, a person must have a thorough understanding of existing knowledge and the critical and creative thinking skills to build upon it.

Metacognition – Metacognition refers to “thinking about thinking”. It’s a thinking skill that involves reflecting on your thinking processes and how you engaged with a task to seek improvements in your own thinking processes.

Evaluation – Evaluation goes beyond reading for understanding. It moves up to the level of assessing the correctness, quality, or merits of information presented to you.

Abstract thinking – Abstraction refers to engaging with ideas in theoretical rather than practical ways. The step up from learning about practical issues to applying practical knowledge to abstract, theoretical, and hypothetical contexts is considered higher-order.

Identifying logical fallacies – students are asked to look at arguments and critique their use of logic.

Open-ended questioning : Instead of asking yes/no questions, teachers try to ask questions requiring full-sentence responses. This can lead students to think through and articulate responses based on critique and analysis rather than simple memorization.

Active learning : By contrast, when students actually complete tasks themselves, they are engaging in active learning.

High expectations : This involves the teacher insisting students try their hardest in all situations. Often, low expectations allow students to ‘coast along’ with simple memorization and understanding and don’t ask them to extend their knowledge.

Scaffolding and modelled instruction : Often, students don’t fully understand how to engage in higher-order thinking. To address this, teachers demonstrate how to think at a high level, then put in place scaffolds like question cards and instruction sheets that direct students toward higher levels of thinking.

Critiques of Higher order thinking

There are two central critiques of the concept of higher-order thinking and its applications in education:

It is not linear: Sometimes, lower-order thinking is challenging and requires great skill, while other higher-order tasks can be objectively much easier. For example, the ability to simply follow a piece of logic in a graduate-level physics class (supposedly lower-order) requires much greater cognitive skill than the ability to create something in a grade 7 math class (creativity being higher-order). Thus, simply engaging in higher-order thinking doesn’t tell us everything we should know about someone’s cognitive and intellectual capacity.

Focus on thinking rather than outcomes: John Biggs argues that the use of Bloom’s taxonomy is insufficient for curriculum design because it focuses on often unassessable internal cognitive processes rather than the outcomes of those processes.

The Impact of Technology on Higher-Order Thinking in the Classroom

The digital revolution has had a profound impact on the development of higher-order thinking skills in the classroom, transforming traditional teaching methods and expanding the horizons of both educators and students.

The introduction of innovative platforms such as White Rose Maths , Hegarty Maths, and TTRS has fostered a synthesis of knowledge, seamlessly merging cognitive processing with student-learning outcomes. These platforms, akin to the interconnected neurons in the brain, enable students to connect the dots between previously unrelated concepts, promoting deeper understanding and critical thinking.

The application of c ooperative learning techniques , facilitated by technology, has redefined the way students engage with concrete concepts and navigate the various levels of the solo taxonomy. By encouraging collaboration and the sharing of diverse perspectives, technology empowers learners to explore complex ideas in a multidimensional manner.

This process mirrors the construction of a vibrant mosaic, where each individual contributes a unique piece to form a coherent and comprehensive image.

In this new era of digital learning, educators must embrace technology as a powerful tool to enhance higher-order thinking skills. Research by Kozma (1991) , Jonassen and Reeves (1996) , and Wenglinsky (1998) highlights the potential of technology to improve critical thinking, problem-solving, and communication abilities in students.

By incorporating these dynamic resources into the classroom, teachers can create an enriching environment that fosters the growth of cognitive abilities and ensures students are well-equipped to navigate the challenges of the 21st century.

Promoting deeper human cognition across your school

Strategies that teachers may use in their classes to encourage higher-order and critical thinking skills include:

Posing provocative questions, statements or scenarios to generate discussion (for example, the use of 'what if' questions). The questioning matrix is a very useful tool.

Requiring students to explain concepts using analogies, similes and metaphors. This requires the teacher to unpick words, find alternatives and allow students to construct their own meaning from the content presented.

Posing problems with no single solution or multiple pathways to a solution. This approach involves learners being given the time and space to complete a task and be supported to 'fail' at finding a solution. Developing problem-solving skills requires developing resilience in students to enable them to fail at a task.

Modelling a range of problem-solving strategies using concept mapping to assist students in making connections between and within ideas.

Posing paradoxes for students to consider (for example: In a study of World War 1, students can be presented with the statement: 'War nurses saved lives, but they also contributed to deaths') creating an 'I wonder' wall in your classroom: depth of knowledge table (informed by Webb 2002)

Developing higher-order thinking skills with our students enables them to assess, evaluate, apply and synthesise information. These skills enhance comprehension, which makes communication more effective. Which, in turn, will support students to achieve in the education system .

Furth reading on developing lifelong learning

Anderson, L. W., Krathwohl, D. R., Airasian, P. W., Cruikshank, K. A., Mayer, R., Pintrich, P. R., Raths, J. D., & Wittrock, M. C. (2001). A Taxonomy for Learning, Teaching, and Assessing: A Revision of Bloom ‘s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives. New York: Longman

Bloom, B. S. (1956). Taxonomy of educational objectives. Vol. 1: Cognitive domain. New York: McKay , 20, 24.

Bloom, B.S. (Ed.), Engelhart, M.D., Furst, E.J., Hill, W.H., & Krathwohl, D.R. (1956). Taxonomy of educational objectives: The classification of educational goals. Handbook 1: Cognitive domain . New York: David McKay.

Byrne, R. M. J. (2005). The rational imagination: How people create alternatives to reality . MA: MIT Press.

Cannella, G. S., & Reiff, J. C. (1994). Individual constructivist teacher education: Teachers as empowered learners. Teacher education quarterly , 27-38.

Dewey, J. (1938). Experience and education. New York: Macmillan.

Eber, P. A., & Parker, T. S. (2007). Assessing Student Learning: Applying Bloom’s Taxonomy. Human Service Education , 27 (1).

Flinders, D., & Thornton, S. (2013). The curriculum studies reader. (4th Ed.). New York: Routledge.

Golsby-Smith, Tony (1996). Fourth order design: A practical perspective. Design Issues, 12(1), 5–25. https://doi.org/10.2307/1511742

Krathwohl, D. R. (2002). A revision of Bloom’s taxonomy: An overview. Theory into Practice, 41 (4), 212-218.

Additionally, here are five key studies exploring higher order thinking skills (HOTS) and their implications in the classroom, providing diverse perspectives on how researchers have explored this notion and promoted it in educational settings:

• Singh and Marappan (2020) discuss the importance of HOTS in English Language Teaching (ELT), highlighting challenges like teachers' lack of expertise and motivation , and recommending further training and resources to enhance HOTS in students.
• Yurniwati and Utomo (2020) examine the effectiveness of a problem-based learning flipped classroom design in developing HOTS during the COVID-19 pandemic, finding it beneficial for self-directed learning and collaboration among students.
• Diena, Wilujeng, and Perdana (2023) emphasize the necessity of integrating HOTS in science learning and outline supporting components such as teacher competence, technology, strategy, and student motivation for successful HOTS-based learning.
• Richland and Simms (2015) propose that analogical reasoning is a key component of higher order thinking in education, arguing that it can enhance understanding across various subjects by fostering the ability to compare and map structured relationships .
• Ghifari (2021) explores instructional design processes for developing students' HOTS in mathematics, focusing on non-routine problem-solving, critical and creative thinking, and knowledge construction for meaningful learning .

These studies collectively underscore the critical role of HOTS in contemporary education, illustrating various strategies for enhancing these skills among students across different subjects and educational levels.

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