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Higher order thinking skills: Key to surviving fourth industrial revolution
The fourth industrial revolution — particularly marked by an automation of low-skilled jobs thanks to the evolution of thinking machines equipped with high-capacity and real-time data analysis capabilities — is threatening to render a lot of low-skilled jobs obsolete across the globe
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The fourth industrial revolution — particularly marked by an automation of low-skilled jobs thanks to the evolution of thinking machines equipped with high-capacity and real-time data analysis capabilities — is threatening to render a lot of low-skilled jobs obsolete across the globe.
Fortunately, a number of social scientists have predicted that along with the vanishing of low-skilled jobs, the fourth industrial revolution will open plenty of opportunities in high-skilled and creative job sectors. In order to remain attractive for employment in these sectors, however, human capital must be strong in higher order thinking skills.
Education experts Alice Thomas and Glenda Thorne define higher order thinking skills as those embodying the capability of critical analysis, creative synthesis as well as the ability to grasp patterns that are not readily obvious. They define these skills as “higher order” as they require deeper cognitive processes as opposed to the lower order thinking skills, which comprise rote memorization of information, formulas or sequences.
The Indonesian formal education curriculum, unfortunately, typically equips students with merely lower order thinking skills, killing the natural inquisitiveness and curiosity of children.
Therefore, the UniSadhuGuna educational institute — which strives to improve Indonesian education quality overall through its international college, preparatory junior college, testing center, business and music school — has just organized a seminar themed around the education sector’s challenges in facing the fourth industrial revolution.
The seminar was organized by the UniSadhuGuna Testing Centre (UTC) in late July, inside the University of Indonesia’s (UI) School of Humanities, joined particularly by English teachers from schools across Jakarta and its satellite cities.
The UTC represents the University of New South Wales in Australia’s Educational Assessments Australia institution to conduct university enrollment and English proficiency examinations in Indonesia.
The seminar featured two speakers: UI School of Humanities senior lecturer Sisilia Halimi, who discussed how the fourth industrial revolution had started to change human behavior, habits and culture; as well as The British Institute senior teacher trainer R. Monika, who discussed how to use the internet and digital gadgets as educational instruction tools.
The seminar also explored how teachers could modify their curriculum and teaching methods using sophisticated technology to boost students’ higher order thinking skills, along with their soft skills, such as social and cultural adaptation, which are very important to survive the changes brought by the fourth industrial revolution.
Anatomy of human thinking
The differentiation between lower and higher order thinking skills was first described by educational expert Benjamin S. Bloom in his book Taxonomy of Educational Objectives (1956). He came up with a continuum that outlined the hierarchy of human thinking skills from lowest to highest, comprising knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis and evaluation.
Furthermore, Bloom also divided the human thinking process into three elements: cognitive, related to abstract knowledge; affective, related to emotional processing and attitude; as well as psychomotor, related to human motor skills.
Drawing from these educational aspects, Bloom concluded that the final goal of all educational processes was to mold students’ three thinking elements, all the while guiding them to continuously upgrade their thinking skills, starting from the lower order ones into acquiring the higher order ones. These things are necessary for students to adopt new skills, knowledge and attitudes.
In 2001, Lorin Anderson and David Krathwohl revised Bloom’s theory, classifying thinking skills into lower order ones comprising remembering, understanding and applying as well as higher order ones comprising analyzing, evaluating and creating.
How teachers and parents can instill these skills to students
According to the seminar’s speakers, teachers and parents can devise some learning indicators to help them assess whether they have been able to instill the higher order thinking skills while assisting students’ learning processes in any given subject.
For instance, they can create a checklist of questions such as “how do my students define/describe/identify this concept? What blocks them from acquiring this knowledge? How can I help them overcome these obstacles?” to measure adoption of lower order thinking skills.
To measure adoption of higher order thinking skills, they can devise a different checklist containing questions such as “how do my students analyze/synthesize/evaluate this concept? What blocks them from acquiring these higher order capabilities? How can I help them overcome these obstacles?”
According to UTC unit head Deddy Mulyadi, equipping the young generation with skills helping them to survive the changes brought by the fourth industrial revolution — as they will be the ones most significantly impacted by the digitization and automation brought by the revolution — is our collective responsibility as teachers, parents and a society.
He added that the seminar could be an example of how different elements of society — teachers, parents, educational institutions and the private sector — could work together to provide relevant and high-quality education services to our youngsters.
