Thinking Skills

This webinar was particularly apt, having just recorded a podcast about Bloom’s Taxonomy in Chinese for my Educollaborate project. These experiences combined have Bloom’s six categories etched into my brain in both English and Chinese! But what is Bloom’s Taxonomy? Well, they are six levels of cognition that may be used by educators to set learning objectives for students. The original cognitive domains were Knowledge, Comprehension, Application, Analysis, Synthesis and Evaluation.

Almost 50 years after Bloom’s classifications were set,  Anderson and Krathwohl’s adapted them in 2001, into Lower Order Thinking Skills (L.O.T.S)  and Higher Order Thinking Skills (H.O.T.S).

LOTS are considered to be Remembering, Understanding and Applying.

HOTS are considered to be Analysing, Evaluating and Creating.

(Please note that LOTS are seem as hierarchical, whereas HOTS are regarded on an equal footing.)

Traditional education has a focus on LOTS, and often emphasis on HOTS is lacking. In this way, in order to nurture your students’ critical thinking skills, consider using the taxonomy to think about what type of activities you set for your them, or, indeed, if you are a student, what activities are given to you by your teacher. By encountering a mix of activities that require both LOTS and HOTS, all orders of thinking are exercised. Indeed, the development of such 21st century skills, which may include multi-literacy and mutli-modality, are part of what is now the mimimum expectation for the future global workforce.