High-order thinking skills are skills that focus on more than just mere memorization of facts. Bloom’s taxonomy lists six cognitive skills in hierarchical levels wherein the top ones are higher-order thinking skills. Skills listed as per Bloom’s taxonomy are:
• remembering -recalling known facts
• understanding – explaining ideas or concepts
• applying – use information in new situations
• analyzing – drawing connections among ideas
• evaluating – justifying a point of view or decision
• creating – producing something new or original.
To foster these higher-order thinking skills among your students, teachers can focus on the following teaching strategies:
1. pose provocative questions, statements or scenarios to generate discussion in your classrooms.
2. Ask students to explain their responses using analogies, similes and metaphors
3. Encourage students to make connections between and within ideas.
4. Pose problems that encourage divergent thinking and have multiple solutions
5. Educate students about different problem-solving strategies
