strategies to build higher-order thinking
1. Improve your Metacognition:
Metacognition refers to realizing oneself. Metacognition is about what you know, what you don’t know, your ability to understand, control, and process your cognitive process.
Metacognition is short is:
- Knowing your strengths and weaknesses.
- How to compensate for your weaknesses?
- How to take advantage of your strength?
- Looking for a creative place to showcase skills, etc.
Metacognition is key for developing Higher Order Thinking.
2. Approach/Type
Make sure that any problem/concept is approachable verbally, non-verbally, concretely, or abstract. Based on the nature of the problem, you must categorize it as a verbal/non-verbal type or concrete/abstract type.
3. Concrete to Abstract and Vice versa:
To understand the problem better, you either move from a tangible, concrete approach to a non-tangible abstract approach. For instance, if the problem is an abstract type, you can use concrete, real approaches to visualize and analyze the problem.
4. Question and Answer:
Ask questions based on
- Textual/base information
- Recent inferences,
- Prior knowledge
You can have a closer look at the problem.
5. Identifying the Problem:
Identify “it’s a problem” the moment you see it. Avoid making late inferences. Be quick. This skill is primary for boosting higher-order thinking abilities.
6. Collaborative ‘Thinking’ Strategies:
As the name shows, the collaborative strategy is, including analytical, practical, and creative thinking skills to approach a problem.
The analytical approach is about: Comparing, Contrasting, Evaluating, Analyzing, and Self-critiquing.
The Practical Approach is about: how to use strategies, how it applies in the actual world, how to use resources effectively, how to implement solutions, etc.
The Creative Approach is about: Inventing novel ideas, imagining, and designing.
Among the six strategies to develop higher-order thinking, we consider Collaborative strategy to be the most resourceful.