I mentioned in my last post that I was going to write about Bloom’s Taxonomy this time. That means discussing LOTS (low order thinking skills) and HOTS (high order thinking skills). Using a variety of activities to promote LOTS and HOTS, the students can start developing the application, analysis, synthesis and evaluation of new knowledge. However, in order to make things clear, the concepts need to be discussed.
Learning takes place when you produce knowledge. Low order thinking skills (LOTS) involve simpler tasks such as understanding and remembering. On the other hand, higher order thinking skills (HOTS) require students to think deeper and longer, analyze, compare, contrast, categorize, hypothesize, evaluate and create. Bloom’s Taxonomy is the most widely accepted concept and it can be viewed as a development of thinking skills starting with lower knowledge-level thinking and moving eventually to evaluation-level of thinking.
What kind of exercises promote low level thinking skills? Activities such as naming, recognizing, listing, describing, identifying, retrieving, finding and defining, which can be placed in the level of remembering, as well as comparing, explaining, classifying, exemplifying and summarizing, which can be placed in the level of understanding.
I have been talking about critical thinking in my posts and my talks, and in order to develop it, we should bring to our students tasks that promote higher-order thinking skills, such as applying, checking, hypothesizing, integrating, monitoring, creating, designing, planning, producing, inventing.
Students need to be constantly challenged and our lessons should provide them with this opportunity to develop their thinking skills. They should be required to combine facts and ideas in order to reach their own conclusions. Therefore, they will be able to become problem-solvers, decision-makers and discover new meanings and understandings; skills they will use for life.
