Despite the importance of knowledge in education, nowadays it’s highly recommended to move students further than memorizing information and focus on developing their cognitive skills. These skills are divided into two levels: the lower-order thinking skills (LOTS) and the higher-order thinking skills (HOTS) based on Bloom’s Taxonomy (1965). In this regard, the educational experts are calling to promote HOT skills in order to help students be more critical and creative, for instance, in questioning and problem-solving.
What is higher-order thinking?
Higher-order thinking, or “HOT” in brief, takes thinking beyond recalling facts to higher levels. Instead of memorizing facts, HOT skills enable students to understand them, associate them with other facts, go beyond them, infer from them, use them in new contexts, categorize them, and apply them while solving new problems. Higher-order thinking skills are derived from the top three levels in Bloom’s Taxonomy: analysis, synthesis, and evaluation.
There are numerous activities teachers can implement to enhance HOT skills. These activities should enable students to invest the acquired information to develop more skills. They may be asked to create a new ending to a book or a story or to discuss why a particular character in a novel behaved in a certain way. In language learning classes, teachers can ask learners to induce new grammar rules or new vocabulary. All These kinds of activities demand higher-order thinking skills.
