I.

Overview

When I say to my students You want HOTS, not just LOTS, I encourage them to acquire
higher order thinking skills which are grounded in lower order thinking skills.

Below are six levels of thinking skills from the lowest to the highest:

LOTS (lower order thinking skills): remembering, understanding, and applying

HOTS (higher order thinking skills): analyzing, evaluating, and creating

When students are unable to apply grammar rules they have learned to write grammatically
correct sentences, let alone thoughtful passages to demonstrate their abilities to analyze or
evaluate a given topic, this is because they acquired only the two lowest order thinking
skillsremembering and understandingwhich unfortunately are too often the focus of
traditional education. Being able to recall something but not being able to apply that
knowledge is not true knowing.

After years of working with high school students on college planning and applications, I
have come to see that the so-called college essaycollectively known as personal
statementrequires students to analyze their environments, reflect on their experiences,
evaluate their accomplishments or lack thereof, envision their futures, and create
personalized pathways to reach their academic objectives and life goals. In short, writing
college essays requires HOTS. Many students find writing personal statements daunting
because they have not acquired HOTS in order demonstrate these skills in their essays.

Looking at this from a college admissions officers point of view: his or her task is to select
candidates who can distinguish themselves from a sea of applicants with similar grades and
test scores. The college admissions office is not only interested in an applicants numbers
but also in the applicant as a person who has thoughtful ideas and unique abilities which
can only be revealed through the essays.

II. HOTS and LOTS in Blooms Taxonomy

HOTS and LOTS are cognitive or thinking skills that students develop throughout
elementary and secondary schools, and continue into higher education. The classification of
these thinking skills is based on the research of educational psychologist and international
activist Benjamin Bloom (1913-1999). Benjamin Bloom saw education as a way to realize
human potential. He spent more than thirty years teaching and researching at the University
of Chicago, during which he led a team of cognitive psychologists in a study of educational
goals and developed a method of classification for learning activities and objectives known
as Blooms taxonomy.

Blooms taxonomy contains three learning domains: cognitive (knowledge or the thinking
domain), affective (attitude or the feeling domain), and psychomotor (skills or the physical
domain). This article will only touch on the cognitive domain for which Bloom and his
students outlined a hierarchy of six thinking skills from the lowest to the highest:
remembering, understanding, applying, analyzing, evaluating, and creating (revised by
Krathwohl and Anderson in 2001).

III. HOTS and LOTS in Todays Classroom

Since the publication of the first volume of his research in 1956, Benjamin Blooms study of
measurable learning objectives has been guiding generations of educators in the designs of
curricula and evaluations of learning goals throughout the world. Below are definitions of
these thinking skills, some of the verbs commonly used to connote them, and some
examples of classroom activities used to develop these skills.

Remembering: learning by repetition or rote memorization and recalling relevant

knowledge from long-term memory

Verbs: defining, finding, identifying, listing, naming, and recognizing

Ex. learning the alphabet, remembering a song, memorizing the multiplication table, telling
left from right, recalling facts, and answering who, what, where, when questions
 Understanding: constructing meaning from oral, written, and graphic messages
through classifying, explaining, illustrating, and interpreting facts
Verbs: categorizing, describing, exemplifying, paraphrasing, and summarizing
Ex: identifying number pattern, recognizing prefixes and suffixes, discerning sequence of
event, acknowledging facts, and comprehending literal meaning

Applying: solving problems by applying acquired facts, rules, or techniques in a different

way or a in new situation; carrying out a procedure through executing
Verbs: constructing, demonstrating, implementing, modifying, simulating, and solving
Ex: applying grammar rules to write grammatically correct sentences to clearly
communicate ideas, making a timeline of the Civil War, and demonstrating how clouds are
formed

Analyzing: breaking material into constituent parts, determining how the parts relate to
one another and to an overall structure or purpose through differentiating, organizing, and
attributing
Verbs: analyzing, comparing, deconstructing, examining, integrating, and structuring
Ex: comparing and contrasting to determine how two things are similar and dissimilar,
establishing cause and effect relationship, distinguishing different perspectives, and drawing
conclusions by checking context clues

Evaluating: presenting or defending opinions by making judgments based on criteria

and standards, checking validity of ideas, or critiquing quality of work
Verbs: experimenting, hypothesizing, judging, moderating, predicting, and testing
Ex: predicting what may happen next in a story or procedure, generating possibilities in
scientific experiment, and making inferences to discover meaning through subtext

Creating: putting elements together to form a coherent or functional whole; reorganizing

elements into a new pattern or structure through generating, designing, or producing
Verbs: composing, devising, imagining, inventing, planning, and strategizing
Ex: creating an alternate ending for a story, composing a song, crafting a story or writing
an essay, making an iPhone application, designing a science project, writing a script and
shooting a video for a US History class project, and planning an Elizabethan banquet for an
English classs Shakespeare unit.

Many of these HOTS activities require more than one skill to perform, and many of the tasks
combine logical, critical, reflective, and creative thinking skills. When a teacher asks her
sixth-grade students to write a newspaper story of the attack on Pearl Harbor, she is giving
a HOTS assignment, so is a physics teacher who assigns a group project to build a model
roller coaster.

Children who like to tinker with technology can find a variety of opportunities and activities to
improve their LOTS and develop their HOTS while having fun:

Remembering: bookmarking, googling, highlighting, social networking

Understanding: annotating, blog journaling, categorizing, Tweeting

Applying: loading, playing, running and operating, sharing, uploading

Analyzing: cracking, linking, mashing, reserve-engineering, tagging, validating

Evaluating: alpha/beta testing, collaborating/networking, moderating,

reviewing

Creating: animating, directing/producing, filming, mixing/remixing,

programming,

streaming, blogging

IV. Develop Problem-Solving Skills Outside the Classroom

Outside the classroom, encourage children to start a blog with others to discuss an issue
they care about, or form a club to solve a problem or meet a dire need in the community.
These activities are good ways to improve childrens HOTS because such activities require
children to first identify a problem, then analyze causes and effects associated with the
problem, evaluate available resources, decide on an appropriate approach or an effective
method, and finally strategize a plan and implement a solution.

Such activities not only can sharpen your childrens critical thinking skills but also improve
their skills in communication, collaboration, and creative problem-solving. By working
closely with others, children can learn divergent ideas and see different perspectives which
may lead them to engage in lateral and associative thinking, not just vertical and linear
reasoning, and thus allow them to consider possibilities they may not be able to think of on
their own. These activities can help children develop HOTS to deal with complex real-world
problems, from local to global, also to cultivate their EQ which is more important than IQ.

V. Conclusion: HOTS and Tomorrows Thinkers

LOTS are often acquired through passive learning and solitary practicing while HOTS
require active learning and collaborative effort. HOTS are harder to develop but these skills
enable students to become better at problem solving because they are able to transfer skills
from one area to another area and from a familiar situation to new or different situations or
under different sets of circumstances, making them multidisciplinary thinkers.

Todays unprecedented challengesclimate change, species extinction, energy crisis,

economic collapse, poverty, armed conflict, international terrorism, and nuclear weapons
proliferationare often inter-connected and complicated; consequently, they demand
multidisciplinary and multidimensional solutions. More than ever in human history, todays
world needs to nurture tomorrows creative thinkers to stem the tide of elevating worldwide
social, political, economic, and environmental problems that threaten humanitys future.