Experiences for Thinking Skills

Objectives come in different kinds, and each kind needs its own sort of experience. Four kinds are worth working through: thinking skills, acquiring information, social attitudes, and interests. This article takes the first, thinking.

What thinking is, and its three kinds

Thinking has many everyday meanings, but the behaviour an objective usually means by it is specific: relating two or more ideas, rather than remembering and repeating them. A learner who recites a fact is not thinking in this sense; a learner who connects facts is. This matters, because experiences built to make learners memorise will not develop thinking.

Thinking itself comes in three kinds:

1. Inductive thinking draws generalizations from several items of specific data. A learner notices many cases and forms a general rule.
2. Deductive thinking applies one or more generalizations to specific cases. A learner takes a rule and works out what it means for a particular situation.
3. Logical thinking arranges assumptions, hypotheses, and conclusions in a way that develops a logical argument.

In practice these are not separate. When learners make relationships, they are reducing and deducing and inducing and reasoning logically, often all at once, even if those technical terms are not used at the elementary level. Real situations call for various kinds of thinking together, so experiences should involve various kinds of thinking, not just one.

Flashcard

What are the three kinds of thinking?

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Answer

Inductive, deductive, and logical

Inductive draws a generalization from specific data; deductive applies a generalization to specific cases; logical arranges assumptions, hypotheses, and conclusions into an argument. Real situations use several at once.

How to develop thinking

If thinking is relating ideas, then experiences that develop it must give learners ideas worth relating. The suggestion is to base thinking experiences on problems that are real to learners, drawn from real-life issues in their daily routine, thought-provoking, and that require relating facts and ideas. A dull or artificial problem provokes no real thinking; a genuine one does.

Within such a problem, thinking tends to follow a sequence of steps:

1. Identify a problem that cannot be answered immediately.
2. Analyse the situation or problem.
3. Collect facts.
4. Identify the question to be answered.
5. Make possible hypotheses: possible explanations or alternative solutions.
6. Test the hypotheses.
7. Draw a conclusion, the answer to the problem.

An experience that walks learners through these steps, on a problem that matters to them, develops thinking far better than any amount of telling. The teacher’s job is to set up the problem; the steps are the learner’s own work.

Flashcard

What are the broad steps of thinking through a problem?

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Answer

Identify the problem, analyze it, collect facts, form and test hypotheses, draw a conclusion

The learner identifies a question that cannot be answered at once, gathers facts, proposes possible solutions, tests them, and concludes. The teacher sets up the problem; the steps are the learner’s work.