HOT, or high order thinking skills takes thinking of students to higher levels than restating the facts. It needs a better understanding of the facts to infer and connect them with others. Also, to categorize, manipulate, and put them together in novel ways to solve problems.
High order thinking skills become essential in this competitive world, to improve learning progress and critical thinking. It helps to ideate and develop insightful reasoning, and hence becomes harder to learn for the students. From being essential at the university studies, it gets now taught to school students as part of the standards-based education reform.
Higher-order thinking skills bring to the curriculum the last three levels of bloom’s taxonomy. So far, it was the first three objectives of remembering, understanding, and applying. HOT is to analyze, evaluate, and create to take the learned facts to create new things. Only with the questions in these objectives will make the students develop higher-order thinking skills. It includes:
- Analyze is for exploring connections and relationships by breaking things into many parts.
- Evaluate is to defend or justify opinions and beliefs.
- Create is to generate new ideas and alternatives to the existing ones.
There are many high-order thinking methodologies and strategies, like conceptual thinking, inference, and creative thinking. It is a concept of notes on the various learning methods on the difference in cognitive processing. But like any other skill, higher-order thinking is also a skill, and learning it through practice is easy. For the students to learn it properly, there should be opportunities created in the classroom for it.
Only by encouraging the classroom spirit to become a habit, and expanding the existing curriculum, will improve the students’ higher-order skills.
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