Students engage in higher-order thinking when they are required ‘to explore, to question, to probe new areas, to seek clarity, to think critically and carefully, to consider different perspectives, [and] to organise their thinking’ (Tishman et al. in Venville, Adey, Larkin & Robertson, 2003).
In the early years of education, it is critically important to develop higher-order thinking skills, which enhance children’s mental abilities (Polette, 2012). Children use higher-order thinking skills when they engage in learning activities that require them to arrive at new meanings and understandings. When children do this, they transform their initial understandings
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Classroom example
This professional learning example shows how one Prep teacher supports higher-order thinking in her Prep classroom.
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Video transcript
Annette Woods
Associate Professor, Queensland University of Technology
Good teachers have always been engaging children in higher-order thinking, in thinking critically about what they’re learning, about actually thinking critically about the world, about the media, about texts, which are engaging with us.
Rae Welch
Prep Teacher Jamboree Heights State School
By providing them with opportunities to create, to design, to build on their own knowledge and think about things a little bit differently.
Rae Welch
We’ve got a slide section. We’ve got a roll section. And in the middle, this one would be the …?
Students (together)
Roll …
Slide …
Rae Welch
Roll and slide. We are going to have to sort all these objects into three different groups. You are going to have to test them out yourself. How would you find out if the things roll or slide or roll and slide? How could we find out? Artemis?
Student 1
Umm … well … put it on the ground and try and see if it can roll or slide.
Rae Welch
Test it out. Yeah, good idea. Good thinking.
That activity allowed higher-order thinking to happen because the children had to classify and sort the different objects and really think about what it was that was making things roll or slide.
Student 2
Slide and then pull it over.
Rae Welch
So when you looked at that, did you think that it would be something that could roll?
Student 2
Yes because it has round edges.
Rae Welch
Did you think it would slide?
Student 2
Yeah.
Rae Welch
Why did you think that it would slide as well?
Student 2
Because it has a flat edge on the top.
They weren’t just putting things into groups. They had opportunities to test them out, try it out. They were hypothesising, as such. ‘I think this will do this. I’m expecting that this will slide and roll and now I’ll test it out and give it a go.’
You have to try and guess. Which group do you think is the slide group? Which group is the roll group and which group is the slide and roll? Have you got any ideas?
Student 3
Yes.
Rae Welch
Tell me, Amy.
Student 3
This one is the slide and roll.
Rae Welch
You think this one here is the …?
Student 3
Slide and roll.
Rae Welch
Okay. Why do you think that?
So that last activity was an extension of the higher-order thinking that had already occurred, because they were no longer having to sort them for themselves. They needed to look and think and justify … Try and work out what the last group of children’s thinking was, and why had they classified things in that way, and give explanations.
Do you think that might be the slide and roll, Krisha? Do you think that’s right? Okay. So who can put a different label on it? What do you think Krisha?
Student 4
I think, I think it can do roll.
Rae Welch
It can do roll. Okay.
Annette Woods
So if we are wanting children to actually engage in high-order thinking, we need to actually provide spaces for substantial conversations to occur within our classrooms. Substantial conversations, substantial time to talk about the text that they’re engaging in, and substantial discussions about substantial issues that are happening both within our classroom, within our school, within our local community, but also global issues.
Children are clever. We know that children know what’s going on in the world. We know now that children at a much younger age engage with media in ways that we might not have ourselves as young children. And so for those reasons, we want to be able to capitalise on important global substantial issues that are occurring around the world and to provide children with spaces to have opinions, to have perspectives, to actually bring their learnings and their experiences into classroom discussions
- Last updated:
- 24 March 2023
