Teaching and Learning Handbook (A Best Practice Guide)

Higher Order Thinking Skills

Higher order thinking skills will be known to some of us through familiarity with Bloom’s Taxonomy. This is a system that categories different learning objectives or tasks that teachers set for their students. He divided these into three ‘domains’;

1. The affective domain deals with the way students react emotionally to situations. This is divided into five levels of response from simply receiving information to changing aspects of their beliefs or actions.
2. The psychomotor domain deals with physical manipulation of the body, a tool or instrument in activities like construction, playing music and so on. Bloom did not divide this further, but subsequent research has explored this.
3. The cognitive domain deals with thinking skills and is probably the best known area of Bloom’s research. He developed six levels of increasing complexity for the tasks teachers set. It begins with basic knowledge and develops a hierarchy to evaluation. The main application in teaching is to help us develop activities that logically direct the student up the ladder of skills, rather than expecting high order skills to emerge spontaneously.

Bloom’s Cognitive Centre Taxonomy
Evaluation	Ability to appraise critically
Synthesis	Ability to combine ideas
Analysis	Ability to classify and compare
Application	Ability to do after a demonstration
Comprehension	Ability to understand basics
Knowledge	Ability to recall information

These six levels of complexity are usually split into Mastery Tasks (knowledge, Comprehension, and Application) which reproduce knowledge or skills and Developmental Tasks (Analysis, Synthesis and Evaluation) which require skills such as reasoning, critical evaluation and judgement. These are the higher order skills.

There is sometimes a misconception that the higher order skills apply to higher level qualifications. In fact students on all course levels should be encouraged to develop these skills. For example a level one catering student who is expected to choose the appropriate knife to use for a particular task has to use evaluating skills.

To help apply this taxonomy to your teaching you could think about appropriate activities for each level of skill. Here are suggestions for setting questions at the right level.

Level Question Prompt
Knowledge	List, Describe, Identify, Label, Outline, ‘Who? What? When?’
Comprehension	Explain, Interpret, Predict, Estimate, Summeraise
Application	Apply, Demonstrate, Select, Calculate, Illustrate, Discover
Analysis	Analyses, Classify, Arrange, Compare and Contrast
Synthesis	Create, Write an essay, Discuss, Design, Strategise
Evaluation	Evaluate, Assess, Decide, Recommend