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Covers how to develop and use test questions and other assessments that reveal how well students can analyze, reason, solve problems, and think creatively.
Develop your students' critical thinking skills and prepare them to perform competitively in the classroom, on state tests, and beyond. In this book, Moore and Stanley show you how to effectively instruct your students to think on higher levels, and how to assess their progress. As states implement the Common Core State Standards, teachers have been called upon to provide higher levels of rigor in their classrooms. Moore and Stanley demonstrate critical thinking as a key approach to accomplishing this goal. They explore the benefits of critical thinking and provide the tools you need to develop and monitor critical thinking skills in the classroom. Topics include: The Difference Between Higher-Level and Lower-Level Thinking Writing Higher-Level Thinking Questions Assessing Critical Thinking Strategies to Develop Higher-Level Thinking Skills
With new standards emphasizing higher-order thinking skills, students will have to demonstrate their ability to do far more than simply remember facts and procedures. But what's the best way for teachers to ensure that students have such skills? In this highly accessible guide, author Susan M. Brookhart shows how to do just that, by providing specific guidelines for designing targeted questions and tasks that align with standards and assess students' ability to think at higher levels. Aided by dozens of examples across grade levels and subject areas, readers will learn how to: take a student perspective and view assessment questions and tasks as "problems to solve"; design multiple-choice questions that require higher-order thinking; understand the difference between "open" and "closed" questions and how to use open questions effectively; vary and control the features of performance assessment tasks, including cognitive level and difficulty, to target different thinking skills; and manage the assessment of higher-order thinking within the larger context of teaching and learning. Brookhart also provides an "idea bank" that teachers can use to jump-start their own thinking as they create assessments.Timely and practical, How to Design Questions and Tasks to Assess Student Thinking is essential reading for 21st century teachers who want their students to excel in the classroom and beyond.
Uses practical and research-based approaches to improve students' higher-order thinking skills and includes strategies for differentiating higher-order thinking skills and developing them in English language learners.
Here's a book intended to help readers develop better test questions aimed at measuring their students' or future students' higher level thinking abilities such as writing, reading, mathematical or scientific problem solving, critical thinking, and creative thinking.
Explicit instruction in thinking skills must be a priority goal of all teachers. In this book, the author presents a framework of the five Rs: Relevancy, Richness, Relatedness, Rigor, and Recursiveness. The framework serves to illuminate instruction in critical and creative thinking skills for K-12 teachers across content areas. Each chapter treats one category of thinking skills. A chapter begins with a brief anecdote that illustrates the category, then discusses the skill, presents relevant life questions, and concludes by examining chosen strategies for the three thinking levels.
This volume examines the assessment of higher order thinking skills from the perspectives of applied cognitive psychology and measurement theory. The volume considers a variety of higher order thinking skills, including problem solving, critical thinking, argumentation, decision making, creativity, metacognition, and self-regulation. Fourteen chapters by experts in learning and measurement comprise four sections which address conceptual approaches to understanding higher order thinking skills, cognitively oriented assessment models, thinking in the content domains, and practical assessment issues. The volume discusses models of thinking skills, as well as applied issues related to the construction, validation, administration and scoring of perfomancebased, selected-response, and constructed-response assessments. The goal of the volume is to promote a better theoretical understanding of higher order thinking in order to facilitate instruction and assessment of those skills among students in all K-12 content domains, as well as professional licensure and cetification settings.
The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the Nation's Report Card, has developed and pilot-tested a variety of hands-on science and mathematics tasks. These tasks were developed as prototypes for use in future national assessments, but the concepts measured and the innovative approaches used are equally suitable for classroom learning. This manual is designed for use by science and mathematics coordinators and teachers to share these techniques. To develop these hands-on activities, NAEP invited the views of science and mathematics educators and worked closely with members of the United Kingdom's Assessment of Performance Unit at Kings College, London University. Tasks were administered as group activities, station activities, and as complete experiments. About 1,000 third-, seventh-, and eleventh-grade students from 12 school districts across four regions of the country were assessed, with approximately 100-300 responses obtained for each task. Results showed that students responded to the tasks, and results conformed to expectations about basic developmental trends in thinking skills. In response to the pilot study, 11 tasks field-tested by NAEP were selected to show a range of possibilities for classroom and assessment use. Each task is presented by thinking skills necessary for successful student performance and the administration mode used by NAEP. Hierarchically arranged tasks are divided into the following sections: (1) classifying; (2) observing and making inferences; (3) formulating hypotheses; (4) interpreting data; (5) designing an experiment, and (6) conducting a complete experiment. The presentation for each task includes a brief explanation of the activity, the student response sheet, a list of the equipment used, and one or more exemplary student responses. (LMO)
This book is a collection of essays on thinking skills instruction and includes the following chapters and their authors: "Encounter with Thinking" (H. Anderson); "Thinking Skills: Neither an Add-on nor a Quick Fix" (A. Costa); "Teaching for Thinking, of Thinking, and about Thinking" (J. McTighe); "Thinking and Curriculum: Critical Crossroads for Educational Change" (B. Presseisen); "Critical Thinking and the Curriculum" (R. Ennis); "Conversation with David N. Perkins"; "Critical Thinking Attitudes and the Transfer Question" (A. Swartz); "Thinking across the Disciplines: Methods and Strategies to Promote Higher-Order Thinking in Every Classroom" (D. Halpern); "Practice Is Not Enough" (B. Beyer); "Learning to Learn: Improving Thinking Skills across the Curriculum" (M. Heiman); "A Strategy for Developing Dialectical Thinking Skills" (J. Rudinow and R. Paul); "Strategies for Active Involvement in Problem Solving" (J. Karmos and A. Karmos); "Restructuring What We Teach to Teach for Critical Thinking" (R. Swartz); "Developing Metacognition in Composition with Peer Response Groups" (L. Meeks); "Basics in Bloom" (N. Hoelzel); "Teaching Thinking to Teach Literature while Teaching Literature to Teach Thinking" (N. Yeager); "Using Thinking Skills in Modified ESL" (P. Jaynes); "The Direct Teaching of Analysis" (R. Charlton); "Conversation with Arthur Whimbey"; "Teaching Precise Processing through Writing Instruction" (K. Didsbury); "Thinking about Learning: An Anarchistic Approach to Teaching Problem Solving" (J. Lochhead); "Holistic Thinking Skills Instruction: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Improving Intellectual Performance" (W. Sadler, Jr.); "Cognitive Modifiability in Adolescence: Cognitive Structure and Effects of Intervention" (R. Feuerstein and others); "Using Vocabulary Study to Generate Thinking" (E. Roberts); "Teaching Critical Thinking: Are We Making Critical Mistakes? Possible Solutions" (R. Sternberg); "The Direct Teaching of Thinking as a Skill" (E. de Bono); "Developing Students' Thinking Skills through Multiple Perspectives" (R. Rubin); "Developing Thinking Skills in Music Rehearsal Class" (D. Reahm); "Developing Higher-Order Thinking Skills in Home Economics: A Lesson Plan" (N. Watts); "Using Literature to Develop Critical Thinking Skills" (M. Tymoczko); "Questioning in a Writing Program to Develop Thinking" (P. Flemming);"Simulation and Thinking" (R. Levitsky); "The Pre-Contact Time American Indian: A Study in the Meaning and Development of Culture--A Teaching Unit" (J. Feeser); "Think Metric" (D. Gallo); and "The Art of Socratic Reasoning" (E. Skorpen). (MS)
