Thinking Skills Today you may hear a lot from educators about higher-order thinking skills. The jargon generally goes something like this: Skills for workers in the twenty-first century will require the students of today to focus more on higher-order thinking skills and less on lower-order thinking skills. We must move away from drill-grill-and-kill teaching and allow students to explore more creative and critical thinking skills. First let's define the terms. When educators refer to lower-order thinking skills, they generally mean memorization of facts such as dates, formulas, and scientific principles, and drilling on the basic skills such as grammar and punctuation. Sure we need to teach those things, the reasoning goes, but we really need to push students into the more advanced level of higher-order skills. By this they generally mean interpreting facts, analyzing for bias, synthesizing one idea with another, and applying the learning to new areas. However, before we trash those old fashioned lower skills (the very term "lower order" reflects some educators' low regard for them), we need to reexamine their crucial role in helping students reach "higher," more creative levels of thinking. Research in thinking skills has found one thing that separates experts in a field from very good but less-than-expert practitioners. That is that experts are so skilled at the basics they can quickly move to more advanced and creative problem solving. For instance, it was found that the most advanced chess players had played so much and seen almost every conceivable pattern of playing that, when their opponents moved a piece, they were already familiar with the move and what it could lead to. They could, therefore, concentrate on creatively outmaneuvering their opponents. Likewise, in a study comparing professional physicists with high-achieving college physics majors, it was found that the professionals were more creative in their problem solving because they had a stronger grasp of the fundamentals. This enabled them to quickly move to more analytical and creative approaches to the problem. Many of today's students have not mastered basic academic skills and are thus handicapped in reaching skill levels necessary for real success in our high-technology society — what educators often refer to as higher-order thinking skills. These skills depend upon proficient use of basic skills and knowledge. Picture two gears. If the lower gear is missing teeth, it will not smoothly engage the higher gear. The higher gear will move occasionally but not efficiently. If, for instance, a student does not read with a high level of proficiency, he will focus a majority of his energy on simply trying to decipher the meaning of a text. He will have little mental energy left to elaborate on how to apply the text's information or how it correlates with other information outside the text. For all the well-intentioned talk of "higher-order thinking skills," too many students don't have enough of a grasp on basic skills and knowledge to adequately function at "higher" levels. That is why it is so important that you talk to your child's teacher about both the content (knowledge) and the skills your child or teen will be learning in each unit. This helps you, your child, and the teacher stay adequately focused on the basics. © 1998, Eric Buehrer