The Obsession With Testing And Our Children's Higher Order Thinking Skills

We live in a time period when No Child Left Behind has practically turned testing our children into a nation wide obsession. Everyone has their own right to decide what they think about our country's education system.

It definitely has its strengths and its weaknesses. Someone who examines the content of many of these tests our children are taking, might wonder what all of this testing is doing to their higher order thinking skills.

For those of you who aren't familiar with the term, higher order thinking skills are characterized as the skills needed to apply, analyze, evaluate, and create new materials, information, or situations.

If you are interested in learning more about the upper and lower levels of thinking, probably the best place to start would be with some research on Bloom's taxonomy.

The lowest levels of thinking have to do with remembering and understanding information. For example, students are required to memorize their multiplication tables in elementary school.

A slightly deeper level of thinking has been reached if the child actually understands how or why the answer to nine times six ends up being 54 instead of just memorizing the answer, and mindlessly repeating it back.

Higher level thinking skills in this area would start with being able to apply the multiplication facts in story problems, or even better yet in real life situations like trying to double a recipe for chocolate chip cookies. Even higher levels of thinking would have to do with analyzing data, and using the analyzed data to evaluate a situation.

The highest level of thinking has to do with creating new material from what you already know and understand. Ideally, this is the stage that we want all of our students to reach in their education. We want to see that they can apply the knowledge that they've learned in all of their classes to create something new and useful.

We want to see that they can apply the grammatical rules and spelling that they've gone through life memorizing to create a beautiful work of literary art. We want to see our future poets discovering the moving verses of poetry they are capable of producing. Our future lawyers should leave school knowing how to present a reasonable, logical, and convincing argument that their opinion is right.

Most people would agree that what we really want out of our education system is the kind of teaching that leads to these brilliant higher order thinking in our students, but the huge focus on multiple choice testing where students are basically giving back memorized information instead of demonstrating how to use it seems to be in direct opposition to the development of these important skills..

Thank goodness for those teachers who among this challenging educational environment have learned to create a balance between "teaching to the test" and providing their students with the higher order thinking skills that will be invaluable over their lifetimes.