Higher-Order Thinking: Understanding the 3 Levels

Explore the 3 levels of higher-order thinking and enhance your cognitive abilities. Develop critical thinking, problem-solving, and creativity skills.

1. Analyzing:

Analysis is the critical starting point of strategic thinking.” – Kenichi Ohmae

The first level of Higher Order thinking is, doing a thorough analysis. You get to analyze the entire problem here.

You do activities like:

  • comparing the problem with previous groundworks
  • look for any similarities
  • compare background knowledge
  • Have brainstorming sessions
  • Break the problem to understand better
  • Hear multiple opinions.
  • Organize your findings to get a detailed study of the problem.


2. Evaluating:

“It is only through evaluation that Value Exists.” – Friedrich Nietzsche

Evaluation is the key.

In this ‘Evaluating’ level of higher-order thinking, you:

  • Precisely identifying the anomalies
  • You remove redundancies
  • You remove irrelevant data
  • You come up with filtered, credible data

And finally, you pick the essentials for solving the problem.

3. Creating/Synthesizing:

“Creativity is the Production of meaning by synthesis.” – Alex Faickney Osborne

You bring your original ideas, new framework, and fresh designs other than what you have analyzed and evaluated so far.

Words/verbs that correlates Higher Order Thinking Levels:

If you want to understand higher-order thinking, these words/verbs will be the one-word solution for you. You can correlate the words to understand the meaning of higher-order thinking.

Analyzing Level:

Action Verbs/Words are: Appraise, Assess, Check, Compare, Conclude, Criticize, Critique, Defend, Justify, and Support.

Evaluation Level:

Action Verbs/Words are: Choose, Combine, Compose, Construct, Formulate, Hypothesize, Organize, Plan, Produce and Role Play.

Synthesizing Level:

Action Verbs/Words are: Choose, Combine, Compose, Construct, Create, Design, Develop, Formulate, Hypothesize, Invent, Make, Makeup, Originate, Organize, Plan, Produce and Role Play

To summarize Higher Order Thinking:

“We are approaching a new age of synthesis. Knowledge cannot be merely a degree or a skill. It demands a broader vision, capabilities in critical thinking, and logical deduction without which we cannot have constructive progress.” – Li ka Shing