Active Learning as a Means to Enhance Higher Order Thinking Skills
What are Higher Order Thinking Skills?
THE CRITICAL THINKING SKILLS NECESSARY FOR LIFELONG SUCCESS
The use of active learning helps create vibrant, engaging classroom experiences … but toward what end? At UT Arlington, we want to use active learning as a means for our students to acquire and to develop key critical thinking skills.
The various levels of thinking skills as categorized in Benjamin Bloom’s taxonomy of the cognitive domain [1956] are:
1. Knowledge: the ability to recall or recognize information, ideas, and principles in the approximate form in which they were learned.
2. Comprehension: the translation, comprehension, orinterpretation of information based on prior learning.
3. Application: the selection, transfer, and use of data and principles to complete a problem or task with a minimum of direction.
4. Analysis: distinguishing, classifying, and relating the assumptions, hypotheses, evidence, or structure of a statement or question.
5. Synthesis: the origination, integration, and combination of ideas into a product, plan, or proposal that is new to the individual.
6. Evaluation: an appraisal, assessment, or critique developed on the basis or specific standards and/or criteria (Huitt, 2004).
According to UT Arlington’s Employer Survey (2004):
- 93.3% of employers responding rated being able to problem-solve as important, very important, or essential
- 96.3% rated being able to apply job-related conceptual knowledge as important, very important, or essential
- 90.8% rated being able to define problems as important, very important, or essential
In short, the very thinking skills that employers say are crucial to their employees’ job performance are the very ones the UT Arlington academic community identified in the QEP development process. Therefore, at UT Arlington we seek to develop in our students, through the use of active learning, the higher order thinking skills of:
APPLICATION ♦ ANALYSIS ♦ SYNTHESIS ♦ EVALUATION
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