Higher-order thinking 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 judgmental 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).
Categories in the cognitive domain of Bloom’s Taxonomy (Anderson & Krathwohl, 2001)
Standards based testing
Standards based tests rely on HOTS for many test items released by U.S. states such as Washington. For example, one fourth grade WASL problem published in 1997 asked how to measure the height of a flagpole given a sun, shadows, a ruler and a fire hydrant. A standard solution for this problem uses similar triangles, a skill not remembered by most adults, and which does not appear on state mathematics standards until the 10th grade. However, the solution published in the Seattle Post Intelligencer does not even use this method.
Mathematics
Similarly, textbooks such as Dale Seymour’s Investigations omit many standard arithmetic methods, instead relying on students to construct their own ways to compute averages, and perform multiplication and division. Teachers are directed to discourage students who may have been taught how to regroup or take a sum and divide by the number of items to compute an average.