Friday, March 29, 2024 | Ramadan 18, 1445 H
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EDITOR IN CHIEF- ABDULLAH BIN SALIM AL SHUEILI

Higher Order Thinking Skills, Why It Matters to Students?

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To achieve goals, and build great abilities, students need to acquire thinking skills. Higher order thinking skills are a necessity for learning in the 21st century. In 1956, Benjamin Bloom created these types of thinking which included a set of six cognitive skills into two categories: lower and higher order thinking skills. According to (Hilmi et al., 2022) lower thinking skills include applying simple steps to routine problems and algorithmic with indicators of remembering, understanding, and applying. Whereas higher order thinking is a problem-solving challenge for students who need to comprehend, analyse, or manipulate information with indicators of analysing, evaluating, and creating.


The rationale for developing higher order thinking skills is that the learner lives in a world of unprecedented changes with a massive expansion of new information, and this accelerated progress makes learners need a high level of skills to deal with this increased complexity, it requires reconsideration of the best effective teaching methods. On the other hand, thinking is a cognitive process thinking. To this end, teachers must guide their students to use higher order thinking as lots of students don’t have the necessary thinking skills.


In view of the imperative of developing higher order thinking, Mainali (2012) stated that there are five steps to move learners towards higher level thinking, as follows: 1.” Determine learning objective: to make high level thinking happen, learning objectives must require students to perform and demonstrate high level thinking. Thus, a well-written lesson plan should target a specific behaviour, introduce, and practice the desired behaviour and end with learner exhibition of the behavioural response. 2. Teach through a question, this technique helps students become more aware of the relationship between textual information and prior knowledge and enables them to make appropriate decisions about which strategies to use as they seek answers to questions. This technique has proven to be especially beneficial for low-achieving students and those with learning differences in the elementary grades. 3. Practice before assessment: practice is necessary to master any skill, students must have the opportunity to practice the knowledge, skills, attitudes, and behaviours that will be evaluated. For students to participate in higher level thinking, they must pose arguments, state opinions, look for evidence, critique the evidence and think with fair- mindedness. 4. Review, refine and improve: students become responsible for their own learning when teachers monitor class activities, create a supportive environment, and carefully track student participation. Collecting feedback from students about what they have, or have not learned, may present the need to need to offer opportunities for relearning and expose areas in need of improvement. 5. Provide feedback and assessment of learning: students’ feedback and assessments provide an immediate and significant source of information for the outcome- based assessment process in evaluation instructional techniques students, achievement, specific learning activities, the course, departmental programme, etc. comparing urticaria and standards to student performance in feedback to students and assessment of course and departmental programmes provides a significant source of information when determining effectiveness”.


To conclusion, it can’t be deniable the importance of teaching thinking skills in the learning process; since it makes students’ role more active, which is reflected in their achievement, and success on school tests. Moreover, higher order thinking skills are not only acquired through the accumulation of information, yet they can be developed out of training, practice, and the design of specialised educational programmes that boost students’ ability to be independent learners, and more confident about their mental abilities.


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