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HOTS Higher Order Thinking Skills

by Sue Watson
for About.com

Definition: HOTs moves away from general knowledge type skills to thinking skills like: synthesizing, analyzing, reasoning, comprehending, application, evaluation. Rather than emphasize the drill and repetition activities, the focus is on problem solving and higher level/order thinking skills. Although many learning disabled children are taught more drill and repetition, there is research that is not in favor of the drill/repetition approach and is in favor of using HOTs. LD children are often weak in memory and will therefore benefit from learning HOTs and developing the higher level thinking skills that teaches them how to be problem solvers. HOTs is designed to develop and increase cognitive development.
Also Known As: Critical Thinking. Bloom's Taxonomy of Thinking Skills.
Examples:
Instead of asking what is or what are type questions, HOTs is asking questions like: what was the impact of........explain why.........evaluate the significance of, why do you think.....etc.

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