HOT or higher-order thinking can be viewed from several perspectives such as education and in real life. Teaching content knowledge through HOT approaches will help students to acquire in depth knowledge of the contents and solve problems in various contexts and disciplines. Teaching and learning activities should not be limited to just teaching students about content knowledge for them to adopt rote-learning. Instead, teaching students content knowledge along with thinking will help students to be skillful in their thinking. HOT is a skill that be learned and can be taught. Examples of HOT skills are critical thinking, creative thinking, mathematical thinking and scientific thinking. The use of HOT will help students to understand problem situations, solve problems creatively, evaluate arguments, reasoning and ideas critically. Besides, students will be more confident and able to solve non-routine problems and through their ability to analyze, evaluate and create new ideas and solutions to complex problems.
Students are said to be engaged in HOT when they visualize a problem by drawing a diagram, identify relevant implicit information, plan and monitor the solution of a problem, seek reasons and causes, justify solutions, see more than one side of a problem, weigh sources of information based on their credibility, reveal bias or logical inconsistencies, examine assumptions critically and able to employ wise decision making and efficient problem solving.
HOT can be integrated or infused into content knowledge by several pedagogical approaches such as Problem Solving, Thinking-based learning (TBL) and Thinking Routines. Developing HOT questions based on Bloom’s Taxonomy and applying HOT skills in the process of teaching and learning will help students to be skillful thinkers.
One of the challenges facing educators today is how to design lesson plans so that students could be assessed not only in their understanding of content knowledge but also in the type of HOT skills employed by them (students) when they solve problems, thus making thinking visible both to the learners and the teachers.
In fact training modules available at our Center for Teaching Thinking and Innovation (CenT-TI) are aimed at developing a culture of thinking in schools and society where we demonstrate to the educators, students and parents on how HOT could be promoted and valued both in classrooms and real life.
Director Center For Teaching Thinking And Innovation (CenT-TI)
Co-founder Center For Teaching Thinking (CTT) /
Formerly Senior Researcher and Consultant
CTT Institute Of Education, International Islamic University Malaysia
