Higher order thinking about HOTS
All hail Higher Order Thinking Skills!
HOTS (gotta love the acronym) conjures up images of Einstein, Hawking and Holmes. Who wouldn’t want to be them? Who wouldn’t want to have a company full of them? If our schools could teach more kids to have good HOTS, think of how far our country could go. Or so goes the lower level thinking of HOTS.
Higher order thinking skills involved analyzing and evaluating. In contrast lower order thinking skills involve things like observing and describing. We are being pushed towards prizing the former, when often we really value the latter because it can be so much harder to do.
Take our friend Sherlock Holmes. Yes he was able to use the art of deduction to solve crimes, clearly using higher order thinking. But his greatest skills was observing which we are told is a lower order thinking skill. His classic rebuke to Dr. Watson in A Scandal in Bohemia was, “You have not observed. And yet you have seen.”
Nathan Woods in the Journal of Education wrote, “In some situations the ability to observe and describe something accurately and in detail is demanding. Because human minds tend to impose patterns or ‘meanings’ onto their perceptions, the ability to see accurately and in detail is often difficult.”
In contrast, higher order thinking like analyzing a text, breaking it into parts and see how the parts make up to the whole, can be much easier than writing an accurately descriptive paragraph of an observation.
Yet our schools want to focus heavily on HOTS. They want to teach it. Test it. Foster it. Why? Because business claims to want it.
As a business owner I might like the concept of a bunch of really smart people analyzing my business and coming up with creative solutions to bring in more revenue. I may even buy into the concept of business disrupters which worked well for Aldi, but not so much for Garmin after Google Maps completely blew apart their business model. Higher order thinking skills work really well for the entrepreneur who can analyze an existing market, like for-hire transportation, and come up with a completely different delivery model (Uber) to shift market share away fromHigher order thinking about HOTS – Missouri Education Watchdog:
