HOTS

What Are Higher-Order Thinking Skills?
Higher-order thinking skills (or HOTS) are essentially critical thinking skills. Cultivating these
types of skills represents the ultimate goal of the learning process because they demonstrate the
student has reached a substantial degree of self-sufficiency as a thinker.
Higher-order thinking skills go beyond lower-order thinking skills like concept formation, basic
reading comprehension, or rote memorization to include the abilities to analyze, synthesize, and
evaluate information. As an example, lower-order thinking skills might help you with memorizing
the correct answers for a multiple-choice test, but higher-order thinking skills are necessary
to write an essay that makes a cogent argument.
The educational psychologist Benjamin Bloom deserves attribution for his initial insights into
higher-order thinking skills. Teacher education programs often use Bloom’s taxonomy as
portrayed in his Taxonomy of Educational Objectives: The Classification of Educational
Goals. Bloom’s taxonomy is a pyramidal diagram representing how higher-level thinking skills
build on lower-level ones to achieve learning objectives.
5 Key Higher-Order Thinking Skills
Learners acquire higher-order thinking skills when they learn how to extrapolate
from information to form their own conclusions. Here are just five core HOTS to
consider:
1. 1. Analysis: After you learn to take in and categorize information, you can
start to learn how to assess and analyze it. This might mean engaging in a
Socratic discussion with other classmates or knowing the right questions to ask
about what people are teaching you. Analysis means truly understanding
what’s being said as an important first step to forming your own personal
conclusion about the information.
2. 2. Application: Beyond learning how to consume information, learners should
know how to apply it in the real world. Application is a higher-order thinking
skill that involves a student knowing how to apply old information to new
situations both within and outside the classroom.
3. 3. Evaluation: After classifying and analyzing information, learners can then
evaluate whether or not they think it’s worthwhile in the first place. This might
mean rejecting an argument as unsound, critiquing a literary text, or realizing
the exact nature of a mathematical mistake. By reaching this level of thinking,
students move beyond just taking in a lesson plan uncritically to forming
nuanced opinions about the information.
4. 4. Metacognition: This form of cognitive processing refers to self-awareness
about your own thought processes. In a sense, metacognition is thinking about
thinking. This leads to greater self-management of both emotional and rational
processing. Next time you brainstorm something, try to think about how and
why you brainstorm in the precise way you do. Once you do so, you will be
exploring firsthand what metacognition is.
5. 5. Synthesis: Eventually, learners should be able to tie together disparate
content areas, disciplines, and information sources as effective mental
organizers. Synthesizing information means knowing how things interconnect
and why. When you synthesize what you learn, you form connections among
various subjects that help you better understand the world and prepare
yourself to learn still more about it.
3 Examples of Higher-Order Thinking Skills in Action
Students’ higher-order thinking skills end up on display in various ways. These three
are some of the main ways in which students’ abilities are put to the test:
1. 1. Comparing and contrasting: In elementary school, a teacher might ask

their students to come up with simple analogies and similes—a mere sentence
or two explaining how one thing is like another. In high school and college, the
same principle is at work in essay writing. For instance, a teacher or professor
might ask for students to compare and contrast two entire novels with each
other. In either format, students use their abilities to analyze, evaluate, and
synthesize information.
2. 2. Drawing conclusions: Consider a student who has to write a final term
paper about the effect of a historical event on specific regions. They’ll need to
look at the big picture, zoom in on granular details, form inferences, and put all
of this into their own words. In doing so, they put many different higher-order
thinking skills to work.
3. 3. Problem-solving: Teachers hope to develop problem-solving skills as one
of the most important learning outcomes for their students. When students
know how to analyze, synthesize, or evaluate information, they can then apply
that information to new problems. They can also think about their own
attempts to solve problems in a metacognitive sense to see if there are any
ways for them to improve in that way, too.

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What Are Higher-Order Thinking Skills?

1. 1. Comparing and contrasting: In elementary school, a teacher might ask

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