I’ve been reading about core thinking skills as described in Dimensions of Thinking: A Framework for Curriculum and Instruction. I believe the information could be helpful to us in the future as we attempt to refine our alignment process.

Marzano, et al make it clear that although their core thinking skills are presented in list form, they believe the skills to be discrete. They posit “highly able thinkers” use these skills recursively and in clusters.

Here’s the breakdown:

Focusing Skills
1. Defining problems
2. Setting goals

Information Gathering Skills
3. Observing
4. Formulating questions

Remembering Skills
5. Encoding
6. Recalling

Organizing Skills
7. Comparing
8. Classifying
9. Ordering
10. Representing

Analyzing Skills
11. Identifying attributes and components
12. Identifying relationships and patterns
13. Identifying main ideas
14. Identifying errors

Generating Skills
15. Inferring
16. Predicting
17. Elaborating

Integrating Skills
18. Summarizing
19. Restructuring

Evaluating Skills
20. Establish criteria
21. Verifying

Especially in terms of ELA, student assignments could be tagged with one or more of skills- similar to what we’re doing now with Bloom’s.

Focusing skills help students spot a problem or clarify it. Students also rely on focusing skills when there is a lack of meaning. These skills are often used early on in the thinking process, but they can be used any time a student needs to redefine or even plan out future action.

Defining Problems
When using this skill, a student is engaged in clarifying perplexing issues or situations. Marzano, et al say that this stage may include asking and answering some of the following questions:

What is a statement of the problem?
Who has the problem?
What are some examples of it?
By when must it be solved?
What makes it a problem? Or, why must it be solved?

Placed in the context of English language arts, we may see students utilize this skill with reading comprehension. We in the ELA team have recently seen several samples involving both fiction and nonfiction text regarding Nazi Germany. If students are asked to explain why Hitler and his followers behaved as they did, the students would become involved in defining a complex, unstructured problem.

In the writing segments of English courses, students are often presented with opportunities to define problems. They may be asked to write a paper about, for instance, Nazi Germany. With no other guidance, the students must then begin to narrow the topic. Prewriting exercises such as brainstorming, mapping, and webbing can help students begin to more sharply define their subjects.

So, if we as reviewers should see a sample in which a student has completed a graphic organizer which helps her to narrow a writing topic, we may tag that sample with “defining problems.”

Setting Goals

Once a problem is defined, the student has to determine what to do about it and when. Building off the previous example in which students have the task of writing a paper about Nazi Germany, the student would benefit greatly from setting goals for research. I do not think we will often see evidence of this in the samples we review; however, the student may mentally plan out a course of action and then record the necessary steps. For instance, the first goal for completing the assignment would be for the student to visit the library to conduct a literature search on the topics that were previously brainstormed. The student may also impose a time limit on themselves, such as, “by Tuesday I will have read the literature and narrowed my topic.”

In reading comprehension, goal setting may be a part of the pre-reading process during which a student may skim a selection and make predictions. One goal for reading would then be to determine which predictions were correct and which were not. KWL charts are a perfect illustration of goal setting prior to reading. In this activity, students list what they already know about a topic; what they want to find out about the topic; and what they actually learned about the topic during their reading. ]]> http://blogs.standardsco.com/wpmu/kmcgaugh/2009/01/16/core-thinking-skills-focusing-skills/feed/ http://blogs.standardsco.com/wpmu/kmcgaugh/2008/10/05/hello-world/ http://blogs.standardsco.com/wpmu/kmcgaugh/2008/10/05/hello-world/#comments Sun, 05 Oct 2008 16:15:24 +0000 Ben Jones Welcome to Blogs. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!