As we move firmly into the information age, it is not enough for students to display only low levels of comprehension and rote memory of what they read. Instead, today's students must develop the higher order reading and comprehension skills increasingly needed in the 21st Century. A variety of powerful approaches and concepts relevant to higher order thinking have been developed. These include Lauren Resnick's (1987) examination of the characteristics of higher order thinking, the types of thinking described in Robert Sternberg's (1996) triadic theory of knowledge, David Perkins' (1992) concept of teaching for understanding and the Critical Thinking Consortium Web site. We invite you to investigate these further in the links provided.

Here, however, we focus on one particular approach, Lorin Anderson and David Krathwohl's Taxonomy for Learning and Assessing (2001), a substantially revised and updated version of The Taxonomy of Educational Objectives first published by Benjamin Bloom in 1956. Anderson and Krathwohl's revision encompasses an entire book, which we recommend highly. We will not, however, attempt to summarize the book here. Instead, what we describe here are seven of the types of thinking examined in the revised taxonomy that we find particularly useful in working with SREs. The definitions of the first six types are taken nearly verbatim from Anderson and Krathwohl. The last definition reflects a mixture of their thinking and our own.

• Remembering—Retrieving relevant knowledge from long-term memory
• Understanding—Constructing meaning from instructional messages, including oral, written, and graphic communications
• Applying—Carrying out or using a procedure in a given situation
• Analyzing—Breaking material into its constituent parts and determining how the parts relate to one another and to an overall structure or purpose
• Evaluating—Making judgments based on criteria and standards
• Creating—Putting elements together to form a coherent or functional whole, reorganizing elements into a new pattern or structure (p. 31)
• Being metacognitive—Being aware of one's own comprehension and being able and willing to repair comprehension breakdowns when they occur

In each SRE on the site, we list the higher order reading and comprehension objectives addressed—the Anderson and Krathwohl levels beyond Remembering—in a separate section.

To illustrate these seven types of questions, we present examples of each type for Shakespeare's Hamlet and for the tale of The Three Little Pigs. We deliberately chose these two very different texts to show that you can pose various levels of questions with both sophisticated and simple texts.

Sample Questions on Hamlet
Sample Questions on The Three Little Pigs

References

Anderson, L. W., & Krathwohl, D. R. (2001). A Taxonomy for Learning, Teaching, and Assessing: A revision of Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives. New York: Longman.

Bloom, B. S., Englehart, M. D., Furst, E. J., Hill, W. H., & Krathwohl, D. R. 1956). The taxonomy of educational objectives: Handbook I: Cognitive domain. New York: David McKay.

Perkins, D. (1992). Smart schools: From training memories to educating minds. New York: The Free Press.

Resnick, L. G. (1987). Education and Learning to Think. Washington, D. C.: National Academy Press.

Sternberg, R. J., & Sperling, L. S. (1996). Teaching for thinking. Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association

 

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Resnick's Characteristics of Higher Order Thinking

Lauren Resnick lists the following characteristics of higher order thinking.

• Nonalgorithmic   That is, the path of action is not fully specified in advance.
• Complex   The total path is not "visible" (mentally speaking) from any single vantage point.
• Multiple solutions, each with costs and benefits, rather than unique solutions.
• Nuanced judgments and interpretation
• Multiple criteria,which sometimes conflict with one another.
• Uncertainty   Not everything that bears on the task at hand is known.
• Self-regulation of the thinking process. We do not recognize higher order thinking in an individual when someone else calls the plays at every step.
• Imposing meaning or finding structure in apparent disorder.
• Effortful   There is considerable mental work involved in the kinds of elaborations and judgments required. (Resnick, p. 3)

Resnick, L. G. (1987). Education and Learning to Think. Washington, D. C.: National Academy Press.

Sternberg's Triadic Theory of Knowledge

Robert Sternberg has described three basic kinds of thinking—analytic, creative, and practical—all of which learners should get opportunities to use:

• Analytic thinking involves analyzing, judging, evaluating, comparing and contrasting, and examining.
• Creative thinking involves creating, discovering, producing, imagining, and supposing.
• Practical thinking involves practicing, using, applying and implementing. (Sternberg & Sperling, p. ix)

As Sternberg notes, schools typically focus on analytic thinking and largely neglect the other two sorts. This, he argues, is very unfortunate because all three sorts of thinking are important, both in the classroom and beyond it. We very strongly concur, and we have deliberately dealt with all three sorts of thinking in developing the SREs on this Web site.

Sternberg, R. J., & Sperling, L. S. (1996). Teaching for thinking. Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association

Perkins' Teaching for Understanding

As part of considering how to develop students' higher order thinking, it is important to keep in mind that knowledge and understanding are the raw materials needed to engage in higher order thinking. The more information students have about a topic and the deeper their understanding of that information, the better able they are to think critically about the topic. David Perkins and his colleagues have developed and articulated the concept of "teaching for understanding," teaching in such a way that students

• understand topics deeply,
• retain important information, and
• actively use the knowledge they gain.

We believe that the teaching for understanding approach can do much to foster students' higher level reading and comprehension skills, and we recommend both the Perkins' writings and the Teaching for Understanding Web site.

In addition to developing the teaching for understanding perspective, Perkins has stressed the importance of cultivating in students a disposition toward thinking critically. The importance of such a disposition is widely endorsed, and we similarly endorse it. To fully develop their higher level reading and comprehension skills, students need to be disposed to think critically about what they are reading.

Perkins, D. (1995). Outsmarting IQ: The immerging science of learnable intelligence. New York: The Free Press.

Perkins, D. (1992). Smart schools: From training memories to educating minds. New York: The Free Press.

Perkins, D. N., & Tishman, S. (1998). Dispositional aspects of intelligence. Available at: http://learnweb.harvard.edu/alps/thinking/docs/Plymouth.htm

Critical Thinking Consortium Web Site

The Critical Thinking Consortium Web Site contains extensive materials about critical thinking, including general information, position papers, lesson plans, books, events, and professional development opportunities.

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