Epistemology: Cognitivism: Cognitive Development: High-Level Thinking

High-Level Thinking

• Overview:  Perhaps most importantly in today's information age, thinking skills are viewed as crucial for educated persons to cope with a rapidly changing world. Educators, employers, and others call for more and better thinking skills instruction in schools is that American young people, in general, do not exhibit an impressive level of skill in critical or creative thinking.
  
  In drawing conclusions about the effectiveness of particular thinking skills instructional strategies, whole programs, or staff development approaches, several researchers offer a caveat to those who might make curriculum decisions based on this information. Findings from 20 studies on the effects of teaching students the meta-cognitive skills of awareness, monitoring, and regulating of their own understanding of material read show the following:
  
  • Instruction in thinking skills promotes intellectual growth and fosters academic achievement gains.
  • Instructional approaches found to promote thinking skill development include redirection, probing, and reinforcement; asking higher-order questions during classroom discussions, and lengthening wait-time during classroom questioning.
  • Computer-assisted instruction is positively related to intellectual growth and achievement gains.

In both school settings and in the world outside of school, it is crucial for people to have skills in questioning, analyzing, comparing, contrasting, and evaluating so that they will not become addicted to being told what to think and do. Putting into practice the findings from the thinking skills research can help schools to teach these skills and students to gain and use them.

More...............................  Teaching Thinking Skills