key thinking skills

1. Remembering Skills:

Remembering skill is the brain’s ability to remember, identify, and interpret what it sees and what it hears.

Recalling, memorizing, retrieving and repeating information from your brain whenever needed is a unique aspect of this thinking skill.

Associating Words: Bookmark, Count, Describe, Enumerate, Identify, Label, List, Match, Recall, Sequence, Tell, Remind, Recite, Find out.

2. Interpreting Skills:

The second stage of thinking is interpreting. Your mind becomes curious and asks questions like “what is it”, “why is it like that”, “who put it here”, “where it came from” etc.

Associated Words: Conclude, Discuss, Describe, Explain, Illustrate, Predict, Reports, Tell, Express.

3. Application/Implementing Skills:

Implementing skill is about “what you have to do” and “what has to be done”. By the knowledge and resources you have, you solve a problem.

Associated Words: Implement, Imitate, Show, Reveal, Produce, Choose, Gather, Use.

4. Analyzing/Scrutinizing Skills:

Systematically and logically you break the problem elements at this level. You disengage irrelevancies. You differentiate, compare, examine, categorize and experiment your problem-scenarios.

Associated Words: Characterize, Categorize, Classify, Compare, Predict, Rank, Redefining, Outlining, Subdivide, Research, Represent, Map, Diagrammatic Representation.

5. Judgmental Skills:

You draw conclusions based on facts and data. You justify your standpoint in this stage. To justify, you assess, support, evaluate, find credibility to your solutions and communicate it to people. Evaluation and judging is a crucial thinking skill.

Associated Words: Test, Compare, Critique, Defend, Rank, Judge, Justify, Argue.

6. Creative Skills:

Creativity is a higher-order thinking skills different from others. We can combine it with other thinking skills. Or, we can use it independently.

Associated Words: Invent, Modify, Reverse-Engineer, Rearrange, Networking, Revise, Remodel, Out of the Box, New Framework.

Conclusion:

The above are 6 major categories of thinking skills we see. And are based on bloom’s taxonomy of critical thinking.