cognitive skill

TOPIC      : Cognitive and Higher Order Thinking Skills across the Curriculum

TRAINER: Ms Carole

DATE       : 15/10/2014

REPORT

Cognitive Skills or better known as Thinking Skills is a process we use when we think and learn. This skills starts to develop during early age and it can be a concrete information processing skills such as identifying and organizing information such as answering WH questions. Thinking skills also known as creative thinking and synthesis and it’s done with a combination of knowledge and imagination to solve problems and generate new ideas. Enquiry skills provides us with a chance to ask questions whereas Evaluation skills gives us chance to make judgement, giving comments on effectiveness.

There are two categories of thinking skills which are LOTS (lower order thinking skills) and HOTS (higher order thinking skills). Higher-order thinking, known as higher order thinking skills (HOTS), is a concept of education reform based on learning taxonomies (such as Bloom's Taxonomy). The idea is that some types of learning require more cognitive processing than others, but also have more generalized benefits. In Bloom's taxonomy, for example, skills involving analysis, evaluation and synthesis (creation of new knowledge) are thought to be of a higher order, requiring different learning and teaching methods, than the learning of facts and concepts. Higher order thinking involves the learning of complex judgemental skills such as critical thinking and problem solving. Higher order thinking is more difficult to learn or teach but also more valuable because such skills are more likely to be usable in novel situations (i.e., situations other than those in which the skill was learned).

Lower order thinking is the foundation of skills required to move into higher order thinking.  These are skills that are taught very well in school systems and includes activities like reading and writing.  In lower order thinking information does not need to be applied to any real life examples, it only needs to be recalled and slightly understood.  If a person only obtains lower order thinking skills they will not be prepared for real life situations such as the labour market.

Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency

CALP refers to formal academic learning. This includes listening, speaking, reading, and writing about subject area content material. This level of language learning is essential for students to succeed in school. Students need time and support to become proficient in academic areas. This usually takes from five to seven years. Recent research (Thomas & Collier, 1995) has shown that if a child has no prior schooling or has no support in native language development, it may take seven to ten years for ELLs to catch up to their peers.

Academic language acquisition isn't just the understanding of content area vocabulary. It includes skills such as comparing, classifying, synthesizing, evaluating, and inferring. Academic language tasks are context reduced. Information is read from a textbook or presented by the teacher. As a student gets older the context of academic tasks becomes more and more reduced. The language also becomes more cognitively demanding. New ideas, concepts and language are presented to the students at the same time.

Jim Cummins also advances the theory that there is a common underlying proficiency (CUP) between two languages. Skills, ideas and concepts students learn in their first language will be transferred to the second language.

REFLECTION

To incorporate the cognitive skills and HOTS (higher Order Thinking Skills) in a lesson is a goal that every teacher should strive to achieve in their lesson. By incorporating the above in a lesson we ensure that our student will become an active learner and thus will make them think and challenges themselves during the lesson.

Although we (as their English teacher/lecturer) are not their content subject specialist but by embracing the cognitive skills and HOTS in our lessons we are forcing our students to communicate their ideas and thoughts in English via a variety of activities – pair work, small group, larger group and or the whole class discussion.

Being an English language teacher/lecturer we are sometime frustrated with our student’s lack of participation in class but by acknowledging them (the students) as the content expert in their field of Technical & Vocational subjects, we could encourage them to take part in a meaningful discussion in our English class.

 A note of caution however, we need to give our students some time (7 seconds at least) to respond to our question(s). It is also worth reflecting about progressing from LOTS (Lower Order Thinking Skills) questions to HOTS questions to build the student’s confidence level. Another idea worth applying in the lesson is to let the student to ponder the question on their own briefly before moving to pair work or groupwork.