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Higher Order Thinking is thinking on a higher level than memorizing
facts or telling something back to someone exactly the way it
was told to you. When a person memorizes and gives back the information
without having to think about it, we call it rote memory. That's because it's much like a robot; it does what it's programmed to do, but it doesn't
think for itself. Higher order thinking, or HOT for short, takes
thinking to higher levels than restating the facts. HOT requires
that we do something with the facts. We must understand them,
infer from them, connect them to each other, categorize them,
manipulate them, put them together in new or novel ways, and
apply them as we seek new solutions to new problems.
Higher order thinking includes concept formation, concept connection, getting the big picture, visualization, problem solving, questioning, idea generation, analytical (critical) thinking, practical thinking and creative thinking. It includes being able to construct similes, metaphors and analogies that represent concepts.
Robert Sternberg, a well-known professor of psychology and dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Tufts University, says that successful people use three kinds of intelligence that require higher order thinking: analytical, creative, and practical. A successful person, according to Sternberg, uses all three.
Metacognition means thinking about thinking. There are two basic parts to metacognition: thinking about your thinking and knowing about knowing. Everyone needs to understand the way he or she thinks.
A person needs to know his mental strengths and weaknesses. Is he good at solving problems, understanding concepts, and/or following directions? Is he more analytical, creative or practical in your thinking? Does he learn best by listening, seeing, doing, or by using a combination of all three? Which memory techniques work best for him?
The second part of metacognition is monitoring and regulating how he thinks and learns. It is deciding how to best accomplish a task by using strategies and skills effectively. For example, how would he best learn new spelling words? By writing them out several times? By spelling them out loud a number of times? Or by spelling them out loud while he writes them a few times?
Sternberg states that metacognition requires mental self-management. Mental self-management can be described as an expanded view of metacognition. According to Sternberg, mental self-management is composed of six steps:
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Know your strengths and weaknesses.
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Capitalize on your strengths and compensate for your weaknesses.
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Defy negative expectations.
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Believe in yourself. This is called self-efficacy.
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Seek out role models - people from whom you
can learn.
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Seek out an environment where you can make a difference.
As students move from elementary to middle and high school, the ability to think in more than one way becomes increasingly important. Their teachers ask them to do more and more things with the information they have learned and are learning. They may ask students to write a new ending for a book they've been reading or they may ask why a certain character in a story behaved in a particular way. If the students are studying sound in science, they might be asked to design and construct a new kind of musical instrument. They may also be asked to think of some ways to keep whales from becoming extinct. All of these tasks require higher order thinking.
We often think that a student's ability to engage in higher order thinking is determined by his or her IQ, but this is not the case. Higher order thinking skills can be taught.
Resources
Bell, N. (1991). Visualizing and verbalizing for language comprehension and thinking. Pas Robles, CA: Academy of Reading Publications.
Berninger, V. W. & Richards, T. L. (2002). Brain literacy
for educators and psychologists. San Diego, CA: Academic
Press.
Perkins, D. (1995). Outsmarting IQ: The emerging science of learnable intelligence. New York: The Free Press.
Sternberg, R. J. (2007). Wisdom, intelligence and creativity synthesized. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
Sternberg, R. J. & Spear-Swerling, L. (1996). Teaching
for thinking. Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association.
Sternberg, R. J. (1996). Successful intelligence. New York:
Simon & Schuster.
Sternberg, R. J. & Grigorenko, E. L. (2007). Teaching
for successful intelligence. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
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