HOTS- Higher Order Thinking Skills

Have you ever wondered why your teachers made you critically think instead of just memorizing information?These higher order thinking practices as they are commonly known as today are being noticed more often in our classrooms recently. Bloom's Taxonomy is a reference to where we can find all the higher order skills with the appropriate verbs that will help the students attain the level of knowledge you would like for them to achieve. On Bloom's Taxonomy Revised you can find all the levels of thinking with the many verbs that can be utilized. 

Two of the levels I often implement in my lessons at the end of every unit taught are evaluating and creating. When I want my students to evaluate information, they need to have a base where to start synthesizing all I have taught them, which they then use to defend or assess a "so what" statement. Also, I use the creating level when they are going to do a performance assessment. This is my favorite level of thinking as the students really make an effort putting together all their lower order skills to build up on the higher order ones which helps them to create an idea through different means. For example, on a unit about how communities were created in UT, my students had to create their own community with a brochure to convince people to move here. They needed to include vital parts of a community, based on the geography and geology of our state along with what they had learned in that particular unit. Their creations truly amazed me.

When we focus more on higher order thinking skills, as I was taught by my education professors to do with my students, they are able to transfer knowledge among different subjects. Students have become so comfortable with simple memorization for tests that when they are done taking those, they recycle the information and it is gone forever. It doesn't even make it into the long term memory bank. That is definitely not the case with higher order thinking skills. With the latter, students learn the information needed in different ways that they process best and will be able to remember the information as well as apply it when they need it in the future. 

This leads to the question that many people wonder- which is "how to use technology for the development of the higher order thinking skills?" There are many apps and resources out there that are great to use with students or our own children. Our Ed Tech professor recently introduced us to Kathy Schrock the Genius and I am amazed at how many apps there are out there that have been categorized by the Bloom's level of taxonomy they meet. If we start using these apps when teaching our lessons, we won't only be implementing technology in our classroom, but the students will be more engaged and most importantly, they will retain the information they will learn forever and will be able to transfer it into other fields as well. For all these reasons, technology and the higher order thinking skills benefit each other hence we should use them more often when the technology is available.