Resources

Rupert Wegerif, School of Education, Open University

The full version of this review is available to download in pdf format - see box below. On this page you'll find the executive summary.

Executive summary

‘Thinking skills’ and related terms are used to indicate a desire to teach processes of thinking and learning that can be applied in a wide range of real-life contexts. The list of thinking skills in the English National Curriculum is similar to many such lists in including informationprocessing, reasoning, enquiry, creative thinking and evaluation. While some approaches to teaching thinking treat such skills as separate, other approaches treat them all as aspects of high quality thinking or ‘higher order thinking’. Higher order thinking is said to be complex thinking that requires effort and produces valued outcomes. These outcomes are not predictable because the process of higher order thinking is not mechanical. This makes higher order thinking hard to define. Nonetheless it is possible to recognise higher order thinking and to teach it.

The existence and nature of thinking skills is contested. Few experts in the field would now support the claim that there are universal thinking skills or completely general strategies for learning and problem solving. However it is generally accepted that there is a range of relatively general learning strategies that can be drawn out of some contexts and applied again in new contexts.

Some have criticised the thinking skills movement as being too western, masculine and middle class. However the ideal of being able to listen seriously and empathetically to challenges and to respond to reasonable challenges with reform is central to higher order thinking. Criticisms of particular ideas and practices in the teaching thinking movement that offer reasons can therefore be seen as a part of the self-reforming process of higher order thinking.

Most approaches to teaching thinking do not focus narrowly on procedural skills. In fact, successful thinking skills programmes promote a variety of apparently quite different kinds of things including, strategies, habits, attitudes, emotions, motivations, aspects of character or self-identity and also engagement in dialogue and in a community of enquiry. These ‘thinking skills’ are not united by any single psychological theory. They are all those things that practitioners believe can and should be taught or encouraged in order to improve the perceived quality and/or the effectiveness of their students’ thinking.

How are thinking skills, learning and technology related?

Technology is a broad term for human tool systems. Human learning and thinking is mediated by tool-systems. These could include words within a language, a notepad and pencil or a computer network. In this review I limit myself to looking at computer-based technologies used to handle information and aid communication (ICT).

Thinking is both individual and social. There is a constant movement of the internalisation of social thinking into individual thinking and externalisation out
again into social thinking. Higher order thinking is to be found in the whole movement of thought and not just in the individual part of this movement. Technology, in various forms from language to the internet, carries the external social part of the movement of thought.

Much of the current interest in teaching thinking skills is prompted by technology-driven changes in the nature of work. There is a consensus that new technology is bringing about a new kind of economy in which the main products are information and knowledge rather than material goods. Workers in this new economic climate require transferable thinking skills more than content knowledge or task-specific skills. They particularly require an ability to learn how to learn new things since accelerating technological change is making old skills (and knowledge) redundant and generating needs for new skills (and knowledge).

Can thinking skills be taught?

There have been several rigorous surveys of the impact of different teaching methods and programmes in the last decade. These provide convincing evidence for the value of teaching thinking skills.

The emerging consensus, supported by some research evidence, is that the best way to teach thinking skills is not as a separate subject but through ‘infusing’ thinking skills into the teaching of content areas.

What is the role of technology in teaching thinking skills?

There are three main ways of thinking about the role of information and communications technology (ICT) in teaching thinking skills: as tutor or teaching machine, as providing ‘mindtools’ and as a support for learning conversations.

A review of the evidence suggests that using technology does not, by itself, lead to transferable thinking skills. The success of the activity crucially depends on how the technology is used. Much depends on the role of the teacher. Learners need to know what the thinking skills are that they are learning and these need to be explicitly modelled, drawn out and re-applied in different contexts.

The evidence also suggests that collaborative learning improves the effectiveness of most activities. Tutorial software alone is not effective for developing thinking skills, but tutorial software used as a basis for discussion between learners can be a good way of infusing thinking skills into the curriculum. The effectiveness of computer tools, such as concept maps or programming languages, for teaching transferable thinking skills appears to be enhanced when these are used by learners in pairs or groups. The positive effect of collaborative learning is amplified if learners are taught to reason about alternatives and to articulate their thoughts and strategies as they work together.

Technology is therefore best thought of as a support and resource for dialogues in which thinking skills are taught, applied and learnt. The computer as a tutor and the computer as a tool can both be ways to support and resource such learning conversations. ICT can also itself be a channel carrying learning conversations.

How can we design technology to support teaching thinking skills?

The finding that collaboration enhances the learning of thinking skills is important because most software is still designed for individual work. There are several simple design guidelines that could be applied to develop software to support more collaboration (see Section 3.5.3 for details).

Some of the findings about effective teaching for thinking skills could also be incorporated into software design. For example, being explicit about thinking skills, modelling them, designing activities that use the same skills in different contexts and prompting learners to reflect on thinking strategies and articulate them clearly.

Three ways in which the use of ICT can particularly enhance the teaching and learning of thinking skills emerged from the review:

Firstly, through supporting dynamic and multiple representations of information: Visualising patterns in data-sets, for example, allows learners to think at a higher level about statistical relationships.

Secondly, through a certain ambivalence: educational software can act like a teacher to prompt and direct enquiry but can, at the same time, act as a resource while learners discuss and explore ideas. This makes properly designed educational software an effective way of supporting thinking within the curriculum. An example of this productive ambivalence could be to prompt reflection (directive teaching) before, during and after the use of a simulation (discovery learning).

Thirdly, networks can allow students to engage directly in knowledge creation with others who are not physically present. Given the apparent importance of collaborative learning this has significance for home education. Depending on how the activity is arranged, thinking together with others at a distance can be more motivating and can stimulate a higher quality of thought, than thinking together with others in the same classroom.

The best software for teaching thinking skills stems from collaborations between developers and educators or educational researchers.

top of page