EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
‘Thinking skills’ and related terms areused to indicate a desire to teachprocesses of thinking and learning that canbe applied in a wide range of real-lifecontexts. The list of thinking skills in theEnglish National Curriculum is similar tomany such lists in including information-processing, reasoning, enquiry, creativethinking and evaluation. While someapproaches to teaching thinking treat suchskills as separate, other approaches treatthem all as aspects of high quality thinkingor ‘higher order thinking’. Higher orderthinking is said to be complex thinking thatrequires effort and produces valuedoutcomes. These outcomes are notpredictable because the process of higherorder thinking is not mechanical. Thismakes higher order thinking hard todefine. Nonetheless it is possible torecognise higher order thinking andto teach it.The existence and nature of thinking skillsis contested. Few experts in the field wouldnow support the claim that there areuniversal thinking skills or completelygeneral strategies for learning andproblem solving. However it is generallyaccepted that there is a range of relativelygeneral learning strategies that can bedrawn out of some contexts and appliedagain in new contexts.Some have criticised the thinking skillsmovement as being too western,masculine and middle class. However theideal of being able to listen seriously andempathetically to challenges and torespond to reasonable challenges withreform is central to higher order thinking.Criticisms of particular ideas and practicesin the teaching thinking movement thatoffer reasons can therefore be seen as apart of the self-reforming process ofhigher order thinking.Most approaches to teaching thinking donot focus narrowly on procedural skills. Infact, successful thinking skillsprogrammes promote a variety ofapparently quite different kinds of thingsincluding, strategies, habits, attitudes,emotions, motivations, aspects ofcharacter or self-identity and alsoengagement in dialogue and in acommunity of enquiry. These ‘thinkingskills’ are not united by any singlepsychological theory. They are all thosethings that practitioners believe can andshould be taught or encouraged in order toimprove the perceived quality and/or theeffectiveness of their students’ thinking.
HOW ARE THINKING SKILLS,LEARNING AND TECHNOLOGYRELATED?
Technology is a broad term for humantool systems. Human learning andthinking is mediated by tool-systems.These could include words within alanguage, a notepad and pencil or acomputer network. In this review I limitmyself to looking at computer-basedtechnologies used to handle informationand aid communication (ICT).Thinking is both individual and social.There is a constant movement of theinternalisation of social thinking intoindividual thinking and externalisation outagain into social thinking. Higher orderthinking is to be found in the wholemovement of thought and not just in theindividual part of this movement.Technology, in various forms from
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it is generallyaccepted thatthere is a rangeof relativelygeneral learningstrategies thatcan be drawn outof some contextsand appliedagain in newcontexts
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
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