Higher-order thinking skills, or HOTS for short, are those that prepare students to be learners for life. Students that display these skills can connect different concepts, problem-solve, communicate, and apply reasoning to areas outside of their learning. There are various similar HOTS, but they differ in their difficulty level. Before we get into why we need them or how we, as educators, can help students to develop HOTS, it is essential to understand the different skills.
What are Higher-Order Thinking Skills?
Higher-order thinking skills go beyond the memorization of facts and details. HOTS help one to problem solve and make connections between different ideas.
Critical thinking is where you need to evaluate other people’s ideas. As an example, if a student reads a science article about wind turbines and their effect on the environment, the critical thinking component is if the student thinks about the author of the article and the credentials, experience, and credibility they have. Critical thinking skills help one to problem solve and make connections between different ideas.
Evaluation goes hand-in-hand with critical thinking. A student needs to place a value on information that will help drive their decision-making process. This value comes from what a student already knows or an assessment of new learning. For example, during a doctor’s residency, they must evaluate a patient and apply their knowledge to the situation at hand to decide how to treat a patient.
Higher-Order Thinking Skills Examples
Comprehension
This is the understanding of content. With your higher-order thinking skills, students will make connections to other ideas they have previously learned or experienced. A great example of this that many educators will understand, is in graduate school for administration and leadership in education, you need to understand the laws that govern schools and past cases that have been the trigger to the law, as well as how it is applied to current situations.
Metacognition
Most simply stated, metacognition is thinking about your thinking. Students must understand their strengths and weaknesses. For example, suppose a student knows they are great at estimating products in math (678 X 32 = 700 X 30 = 2,100), but hasn’t quite mastered the standard algorithm for multiplication to solve the problem. In that case, they may use a less traditional method such as area models to solve.
Application
As a higher-order thinking skill, the application is where you take previous knowledge and apply it to a similar project, problem, or scenario. In mathematics, a student takes their knowledge of the concept being learned, such as adding and subtracting fractions, and applies it to different types of word and story problems. Students take their basic knowledge of the concept of adding and subtracting fractions and determine which operation to use and how many steps are involved based on their reading of the word problem.
Synthesis
Synthesis is the process of combining two or more ideas to come up with a new, more effective solution. For example, when a student reads multiple articles about the same topic, such as global warming, and compares and contrasts different ideas and viewpoints discussed in the articles. Students shift their thinking from parts to a whole and draw conclusions based on all their reading and understanding.
Inference
This is where the answer is not spelled out for you, but you must use all of the information provided to determine the answer. On a reading test, many times, students must make inferences, as the questions do not require basic recall, but a student to determine the most likely solution based upon all the clues the reading provides. As teachers, there are many times you read emails from administration or parents and need to use inference skills to determine the tone of the email and an appropriate response.
Why are Higher-Order Thinking Skills Important in Education?
HOTS is important in education because students need to be prepared for the real world. Students so often need instant gratification and wrestle with struggle. What I mean by this is when a skill or concept does not come to them immediately, they shut down and don’t want to continue to try. It is crucial to develop higher-order thinking skills for students to learn how to work through a productive struggle and persevere through concepts that do not come easily to them.
Relating content to the real world is important, and pointing out students’ different skills can help them understand why they need to work hard. It’s not necessarily the formula for volume you need to remember for the future, but the conclusions that are drawn from it and the ability to apply this knowledge to real-life situations. Many jobs require fast and critical thinking in various situations, as a manual will not always give you the exact answer to how to handle a situation.
How to Help Students Improve HOTS
Ask Questions
A simple and effective way to help students improve HOTS is by asking good questions. The technique you use to question students every day can help them to develop a variety of higher-order thinking skills. As a math teacher, I constantly ask extension questions and challenge the students to think outside the box to help develop their HOTS.
Abstract and Concrete Topics
Moving from concrete to abstract and back to concrete concepts is another way to help students develop HOTS. A simple example that I read to illustrate this is about an apple. The concrete is the apple as you can touch, cut, eat, and observe it. Moving toward less concrete is a picture of an apple, and abstract is the word apple. You can bring it back to concrete by having an actual apple again.
Graphic Organizers
The use of graphic organizers can help improve HOTS. A Venn diagram helps students to visualize the similarities and differences between two different things and can help students to compare and contrast. Socratic circles are another way to help students develop HOTS. This strategy promotes collaborative learning and has students explore and analyze different perspectives of the same scenario.
There are so many other ways to help students improve their HOTS, as these are just a few ideas. As Albert Einstein said, “Education is not the learning of facts, but the training of the mind to think”, and effective teachers can work to do just that in developing higher-order thinking skills.
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