NUTSHELL NOTESat Denver's One-page Newsletter for Teaching Excellence |
||||||||||||||||
Teaching to Elicit Higher Levels of Thinking (I)In our last issue, we compared a number of models of adult thinking. In that issue we noted that an older cognitive taxonomy by Benjamin Bloom (1956) is probably the best known among college professors. Bloom’s taxonomy in order of increasing levels of thinking level is shown in Table 1. We also saw in the last issue that even though students may be operating at a high level according to this taxonomy—grappling with issues that require synthesis and evaluation—this is no guarantee that these students are operating at the higher levels specified by more advanced models (those of Perry, King and Kichener, and Blosser). This is because the higher levels of these later models require one to do synthesis and evaluation with sophistication and skill, and such thinking differs greatly from doing these poorly. One can extend Bloom’s taxonomy to drive thinking to Perry’s and others’ highest levels, but this requires use of appropriate rubrics (next issue) along with any high-level questions/problems. Students are better equipped to strive for higher order thinking when they know what it is. Otherwise high-level thinking can become an endeavor by teachers to which students will not intuitively respond well. All students have heard about “critical thinking,” but ask your class to complete the sentence: “Critical thinking is _________....” Students’ answers will usually be dominated by vague conjectures. Most tend to see an upper level challenge as a “hard question” but not as an item addressable by synthesis or evaluation. It is the rare student who displays familiarity with a formal framework of thinking, such as any model noted in the table in our last issue. Despite limits noted, use of Bloom’s taxonomy will carry efforts farther toward generating high level thinking than will efforts based on no framework or lack of any means to recognize discrete thinking levels. Bloom’s levels are easily understood, and students can be quickly taught to employ them. So as a start, give your students the Bloom taxonomy and web site in Table1. Have them generate their own questions for review sessions or quizzes, and have them label their own level of reasoning elicited by each question. Overwhelming emphasis of traditional education lies in the lowest Bloom levels, so students may have to struggle initially to produce high-level questions; they perhaps haven’t seen many and have constructed none! By requiring practice, you will give your students two great gifts. One will be an initial recognition of specific qualities that constitute high-level thinking. Second will be a growing awareness for what one must actually do for oneself to progress higher in learning and thinking. To reach high levels in meaningful ways requires a solid content foundation at lower levels. A need in curricular design is mapping of just when and how students will reach the higher levels. Introductory courses should address foundations, but upper level courses need rich engagements in high-level thinking.
|
||||||||||||||||