SCE3106 Tutorial 1 What's HOT?

In a nutshell, Higher Order Thinking is thinking on a higher level than memorizing facts or telling something back to someone exactly the way it was told to you. When a person memorizes and gives back the information without having to think about it, we call it rote memory. That's because it's much like a robot; it does what it's programmed to do, but it doesn't think for itself. Higher Order Thinking, or HOT for short, takes thinking to higher levels than just restating the facts. HOT requires that we do something with the facts. We must understand them, connect them to each other, categorize them, manipulate them, put them together in new or novel ways, and apply them as we seek new solutions to new problems. To understand a group of facts, we must understand the conceptual "family" to which this group of facts belongs. A concept is an idea around which a group of ideas may revolve. A concept is something that helps us organize our thinking. It's a mental representation of a group of facts or ideas that somehow belong together. For example, football, basketball, tennis, swimming, boxing, soccer, or archery all fit our concept of sports. In addition, we might also group these sports to create two other concepts: team sports, such as football, basketball, and soccer; and individual sports, such as tennis, swimming, boxing, and archery. Concepts can represent objects, activities, or living things. They may also represent properties such as color, texture, and size (for example, blue, smooth, and tiny), things that are abstract (for example, faith, hope, and charity), and relations (for example, brighter than and faster than). Concepts come in a variety of forms, including concrete, abstract, verbal, nonverbal, and process. Concept A. Concrete or abstract. Concrete concepts are those that we can see, touch, hear, taste, or smell. Dogs, chairs, telephones and hamburgers are examples of concrete concepts. Abstract concepts can be used and thought about, but we cannot use our senses to recognize them as we can with concrete concepts. In order to understand abstract concepts, we either have to experience them or compare them to something else we already know. Imagination, friendship, freedom, and jealousy are examples of abstract concepts. As you can imagine, concrete concepts are easier to understand than abstract ones because we can actually see or touch concrete concepts. However, as students move up in school, they need to be able to deal with more and more abstract concepts. Not only are abstract concepts harder for students to learn, but they are also harder for teachers to teach! B. Verbal or Non-verbal. Verbal concepts are those that use language to explain them. Verbal concepts are described by using words. Examples are concepts of love, democracy, or politeness. A concept may be both abstract and verbal (for example, democracy). Non-verbal concepts are those that lend themselves to be best understood by being pictured or visualized. Examples are concepts of a circle, proportions, or evaporation. Many times both verbal and non-verbal concepts can be used to explain something. Sometimes a person may prefer one over the other. It is a good idea to try to think

about a concept both by picturing it and by putting it into words. This will give you a more thorough understanding of the concept. C. Process. Process concepts are those that explain how things happen or work. They often include a number of steps that a person must understand in order to master the concept as a whole. Photosynthesis is an example of a process concept in science. The photosynthesis process has certain steps that must take place in a certain order. Math and science courses use process concepts a lot.

Schemas When a student is exposed to a new concept, it is important to connect the new concept to concepts he already knows. He can do this by classifying, categorizing, recognizing patterns, and chaining. It's like finding all the "relatives" of that concept and making a family tree for the concept. For example, if a second grader is studying Thanksgiving, a larger concept Thanksgiving belongs to could be Holidays, and a larger concept Holidays could belong to is Celebrations. Other Holidays include Christmas, Hanukkah, and the Fourth of July. These are all celebrations of some kind. It is good to also think about what is not a Holiday, so students will know where to "draw the line" in the larger concept of Celebrations. For example, weddings and birthdays are generally considered celebrations, but for most of us, they do not become national holidays! Chaining is connecting concepts together that have some common thread. Dr. Mel Levine calls this horizontal threading. A student needs to do a lot of horizontal threading so his concepts will be connected to similar concepts. In order to do this, he needs to look through his memory for things that seem related to the new information. An example of chaining or threading is finding common concepts or themes in history. If a student is discussing what is going on in Kosovo, for example, he might ask himself what the Civil War, the Holocaust, and Bosnia have in common with the current events in Kosovo. Schema is a pattern or arrangement of knowledge that a person already has stored in his brain that helps him understand new information. For example, a student may have a definite image in his mind of what a reptile looks like by the information that he has been told about reptiles, by pictures that he has been shown, and by what he has read. When he encounters a new creature that he has never seen before, but it has all of the qualities that he has stored in his brain about reptiles, then he can infer or draw the conclusion that it probably is a reptile. Some schema is also linked to rules and predictable patterns that we have learned. For example, students can develop schemata for the tests a certain teacher gives, because she always gives the same type of test. This helps a student to know how to study for the test because he knows the kinds of questions the teacher is going to ask. Schema does not always follow a pattern or a rule, however, due to exceptions or irregularities. For example, sometimes students have just mastered a spelling rule or a rule in grammar when the teacher throws an exception at them! In any case, using schema or patterns is a good way to make helpful predictions. Bright children who are able to draw on their higher order thinking are able to:

Solve problems; Think creatively; Think critically; Make decisions; Generate new ideas; Analyse information; Plan for the future;

Sadly, many questions that are asked require a "Yes" or "No" answer from children. Many answers are either "Right" or "Wrong". How can our children of the future be expected to find cures for illnesses and invent amazing things without opportunities to take risks, explore different avenues and have the freedom to think without restriction? We as parents and educators must aim to unlock independent thinking in children. We need to find fun and stress-free activities provide opportunities for open-ended response where children are encouraged to look at things differently and 'think outside the square.' To Promote Higher Order Thinking & Creative Thinking Skills, activities must provide opportunities to encourage:

Creating - Generating new ideas, products, or ways of viewing things, designing, constructing, planning, producing and inventing; Evaluating - Justifying a decision or course of action, checking, hypothesising, critiquing, experimenting and judging; Analysing - Breaking information into parts to explore understandings and relationships, comparing, organising, deconstructing, interrogating and finding; Applying - Using information in another familiar situation, implementing, carrying out, using and executing; Understanding - Explaining ideas or concepts, interpreting, summarising, paraphrasing, classifying and explaining; Remembering - Recalling information, recognising, listing, describing, retrieving, naming and finding.