Intellectual Rigour 

Higher Order Thinking

What is Higher Order Thinking?

Higher-order thinking requires students to manipulate information and ideas to transform their meaning and implications. Students combine facts and ideas in order to synthesise, generalise, explain, hypothesise or arrive at some conclusion or interpretation. Students solve problems and create new (for them) meanings and understandings. When students demonstrate higher-order thinking, they may also generate unexpected concepts, ideas and products which can take the learning in new directions.

 

Higher Order Thinking in the Classroom

• Select, create and implement learning experiences in which students actively access, organise, research, interpret, analyse, communicate and represent knowledge through the application of ICT. 

• Structure lessons to provide opportunities for students to communicate substantively about the key concepts, to engage in higher order thinking and show deep understanding of the key concepts of the lesson.

• Design activities that require students to organise, apply, analyse, synthesise and evaluate knowledge.

• Provide opportunities for students to construct meaning from information and to evaluate, manipulate and transform information

• Select, develop and use resources that require students to evaluate, manipulate and transform information and ideas.

• Differentiate the learning to reflect the range of students in the class supporting their skills to critically reflect on the task or learning experience. When reviewing the work samples as a class, consider to what extent do the student work samples show evidence of interpretation, analysis, synthesis or evaluation?

• Pose questions that can have multiple answers or possibilities and ask students to justify their responses and/or evaluate information from a variety of sources.

 

Application in the classroom

• Using apps such as Popplet for students to add ideas and information to a shared page. SOLE Sessions

• Creating a climate of risk-taking in the classroom through the implementation of Growth Mindset, helping students understand their strengths and what may challenge them.

• Support students to connect concepts, linking to strategies utilised by Focus on Reading.

• See Table.

• Teaching students to infer (FOR) using graphic organisers and problem-solving strategies.

• Question-Answer-Relationships, or QARs, teach students to label the type of question that is being asked, then use that information to help them formulate an answer. Students must decipher if the answer can be found in a text or on the Internet, or if they must rely on their own prior knowledge to answer it. This strategy has been found to be effective for higher-order thinking because students become more aware of the relationship between the information in a text and their prior knowledge, which helps them decipher which strategy to use when they need to seek an answer.

 

Checklist

1. Students demonstrate only lower-order thinking. They either receive or recite pre-specified knowledge or participate in routine practice, and in no activities during the lesson do students go beyond simple reproduction of knowledge.

2. Students primarily demonstrate lower-order thinking, but at some point, at least some students perform higher-order thinking as a minor diversion within the lesson.

3. Students primarily demonstrate routine lower-order thinking a good share of the lesson. There is at least one significant question or activity in which most students perform some higher-order thinking. 

4. Most students demonstrate higher-order thinking in at least one major activity that occupies a substantial portion of the lesson.

5. All students, almost all of the time, demonstrate higher-order thinking.