Rajendran, (2008), Teaching and Acquiring Higher Order Thinking Skills: Theory and Practice

Why Teach Higher-Order Thinking Skills?

There is no expedient to which a man will not resort to avoid the real
labour of thinking. Thomas A. Edison

Do we really need to teach students to think? Isn’t thinking a natural

consequence of teaching and learning in general? Do not people think
spontaneously without being taught? These are some of the important
questions which need to be addressed in the area of teaching thinking. We,
indeed, do think without being taught how to think. We classify, analyze,
generalize, analogize, deduce, induce, form and test hypotheses, make
decisions, and solve problems. We do these things long before we encounter
organized efforts to teach us how to think effectively.

It does not follow from the fact that we think spontaneously that we
think as effectively as we might. And the evidence regarding our limitations
as thinkers and the various ways in which our thinking commonly goes astray
is well documented. When we say we want to teach students to think, we
really mean that we want to improve the quality of their thinking. We want to
teach them to think more deeply, more consistently, more productively, more
effectively than they otherwise might.

It is almost impossible to imagine how one could survive in this world,

if he or she does not reason, plan, act, reflect, and learn to do things better
the next time. This happens on a continuous basis. Sometimes, we are
conscious of these actions, and most of the time we are not conscious of these
actions.

What is important is that, one takes stalk of things and make conscious
effort to improve over time. How one reasons, plans, acts, reflects and
subsequently learns from those experiences could be improved over time.
What seems basis of this argument is the deliberate attempt to improve our
thinking. Everyone is capable of conducting thinking, and most often what
most really do is the lower-order thinking. With right exposure, orientation,
guidance and motivation, we can learn to conduct higher-order thinking.

You can think only that which you know, or imagine, or desire. Likewise,
you can create or express or give out only that which you know. Your power
lies in true knowledge from the still source within rather than information from
the sensed world without. Your ability to express that power in building bodies
lies in what knowledge your consciousness is aware of. Knowledge will build
Rajendran, (2008), Teaching and Acquiring Higher Order Thinking Skills: Theory and Practice

for you a stable life. You can continually transform yourself, and your life
condition, only through continually acquiring greater knowledge, then thinking
that knowledge into the form of you. It is basically, what you think, you
become.

Different problems require different types of thinking. In general, we

don’t deal with unfamiliar problems in the same way we deal with familiar
ones. Besides this, people vary in the ways they prefer to think about things.
Some like doing crossword puzzles while others like making the crossword
puzzles up. Some like problems where there is a definite answer whereas
others like problems where there is one right answer. Some like diagnosing
what is wrong with computers when they crash, while others like to design
new models of those computers. What all these suggest is that, there are
multiple dimensions and approaches to thinking.

Very often, educational achievement and intelligence are linked to

thinking. It has become more evident in recent times that, educational
achievement and intelligence do not necessarily reflect accurately one’s ability
to reason, plan, act, reflect, and learn from experiences. In fact, there is a
general agreement that, test scores only reflect a part of one’s ability to
reason, and the traditional views of intelligence need to be reviewed.

What this means is that, most individuals need to be guided to acquire

the knowledge and skills to conduct higher-order thinking skills. Everyone is
capable of performing such tasks. What is important is that parents and
teachers consciously provide the extra guidance and space to the children and
students to think about the multiple alternatives, try out some of those
alternatives, and learn from these experiences. Over time, they would acquire
the so called higher-order thinking skills.

The last four decades have seen a growing educational interest in

thinking and the ways it can be enhanced in the classroom. The current
interest in teaching thinking skills has also been provoked by the onset of the
Information Era, supported by recent advances in cognitive theory, and
international comparisons of students’ higher-order cognitive skills. However,
the idea of teaching thinking has been in different forms in schools for a long
time. The cultivation of critical reasoning ability has been an objective of
teachers of philosophy, logic, and rhetoric, among other subjects, for a long
time. Aiding students to use their minds more effectively is presumably a
major reason for teaching literacy, numeracy, and other basic skills.
In the United States, for example, there were attempts to make explicit
attempts to teaching thinking as early as in the 1920s and 1930s. During the
1920s and 1930s considerable energy was devoted, largely as a result of
Dewey’s influence, to making the development of reasoning ability a
Rajendran, (2008), Teaching and Acquiring Higher Order Thinking Skills: Theory and Practice

fundamental goal of primary and secondary schooling in America. Also, the

earliest reference cites critical thinking as an important aspect of schooling is
in a 1938 report issued by the National Education Association entitled “The
Purposes of Education in American Democracy”. However, in spite of these
efforts educational practice did not change much, or at least for very long.
In Malaysia, the need for students to learn to manipulate ideas and
feelings that are contained in the text they read, for which, it is assumed they
need thinking skills, has been given attention from the 1990s. The teaching
of thinking skills in the national curriculum formally started in 1992. In 1997,
for example, there was an announcement by the Ministry of Education in
Malaysia that, “the education system will be revamped to encourage rational
and analytical thinking”. The basic issue justifying the efforts to teaching
thinking skills is that, be it in the United States or in Malaysia, there is a
general understanding that after 12 or 13 years of public education, many
students are unable to give evidence of a more than superficial understanding
of concepts and relationships that are fundamental to the subjects they have
studied, or an ability to apply the content knowledge they have acquired to
real-world problems.
One reason for this state of public education could be because of the
fact that thinking skills were not taught to all students until quite recently. As
suggested by Resnick (1987),

Mass education was, from its inception, concerned with inculcating

routine abilities: simple, computation, reading predictable texts,
reciting religious or civic codes. It did not take as goals for its
students the ability to interpret unfamiliar texts, create material
others would want and need to read, construct convincing
arguments, develop original solutions to technical or social
problems (p.5).

It is important to note that, until recently, this has been the exclusive province
of the elite education both in the industrialized and in the non-industrialized
countries. When countries and governments democratized education, that is
extended education beyond the elite, top priority was to educate as many
citizens as possible. The aim of education then was to provide basic linguistic
and mathematical skills required to perform everyday needs. Even today this
is true to a large extent in countries where majority of the people lack these
basic skills.
There is, however, great interest among researchers and educators, at
the present, in the teaching of thinking. There are attempts to include the
teaching of thinking skills in all subjects to all students. There are reasons why
teachers should improve students’ thinking as they build their language
abilities, and mathematical and science skills.
Rajendran, (2008), Teaching and Acquiring Higher Order Thinking Skills: Theory and Practice

A myth, however, exists that as people mature, their thinking and

reasoning naturally escalate. Unfortunately, critical and creative thinking
abilities do not develop automatically. Adults who were not taught to think
critically and creatively exhibit cognitive abilities that are no more advanced
than the thinking processes they used when they were in the sixth grade.
Therefore, it becomes important to also teach thinking skills explicitly
besides the school subjects. In this respect, it seems important to review how
we define and teach the respective school subjects in relation to whether we
teach students to think critically and creatively. To be literate now, for
example, seems to require that students know more about how to think; not
just how to read.
Today’s need for teaching thinking is created by the rapid changes
taking place in society. Knowledge and information are becoming ever more
complex and soon may become dated. Children, therefore, have to be
equipped with the skills of evaluating choices, and identifying and solving
problems using logical reasoning. Thus, it is not enough to have a considerable
amount of knowledge at one’ disposal (declarative knowledge), but the
questions of how to acquire knowledge, and how to apply this knowledge
(procedural knowledge) are also important. It is also claimed that having only
a limited command of thinking skills is one of the reasons for failing behind in
school. This can be seen in mathematics, reading, and writing, where all sorts
of activities come to the fore in which thinking skills play a central role.
Examples are the ability to describe and to compare objects, to group objects,
to associate one thing with another, to form concepts, and to generalize. Thus,
mental processes which are normally associated with the concept of ‘thinking’
are not limited to some kind of ‘higher-order’ of mental development. On the
contrary, thinking processes play a role in a broad range of learning activities
in school. This means that these thinking processes should form an integral
part of the school curriculum. In both school settings and in the world outside
of school, it is crucial for people to have skills in questioning, analyzing,
comparing, contrasting, and evaluating, so that [they] will not become
addicted to being told what to think and do.