Lesson 7

Higher Level Learning Outcomes

To define higher level thinking skills and creativity, we may adopt a framework that is a helpful synthesis of many models and definitions on the subject matter. The framework is not exhaustive but a helpful guide for teacher’s effort to understand the learner’s higher learning process.

Complex Thinking Skills Sub-skills
Focusing -- Defining the problem, goal/objective-setting, brainstorming
Information gathering -- Selection, recording of data of information
Remembering -- Associating, relating new data with old
Analyzing -- Identifying idea constructs, patterns
Generating -- Deducing, inducting, elaborating
Organizing -- Classifying, relating
Imagining -- Visualizing, predicting
Designing -- Planning, formulating
Integration -- Summarizing, abstracting
Evaluating -- Setting criteria, testing idea, verifying outcomes, revising

Figure 4 – THINKING SKILLS FRAMEWORK

The Upgraded Project-Method

Given these complex thinking skills, the modern day teacher can now be guided on his goal to help student achieve higher level thinking skills and creativity beyond the ordinary benchmark of the student’s passing, even excelling achievement tests. Given the fact that the ordinary classroom is awfully lacking in instructional toolkits to bring students to the higher domains of learning and achieving, the project method is suggested.
To explain, the project method for higher learning outcomes consists in having the students work on projects with dept, complexity, duration and relevance to the real world. Improving on the Dewey project method, this new method involves students in the active creation of information, such that there is sustained reflective thinking on topics that have a real-world quality to them.
In this revised project method, there is a tighter link between the uses of projects for simply coming up with products to having the students undergo the process of complex/higher thinking under the framework of the constructivist paradigm. Under this framework, the students, not the teacher, make decisions about what to put into the project, how to organize information, how to package the outcomes for presentation, and the like. Meanwhile, the teacher, without staying away from the project endeavor, guides and facilitates the learning process.

The Process

The process of project implementation takes the students to the steps, efforts, and experiences in project completion. Meanwhile, thus principle to be borne in mind is that:

THE PROCESS IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN THE PRODUCT.
The process refers to the thinking /affective/psycho-motor process that occurs on the part of the learner. This comprises the journey that actualizes learning.
The product is the result of this all-important process consisting in possibly a summary, a poster, an essay, a term paper, a dramatic presentation, or an IT-based product. This is the destination which should be rewarding, but as the teacher seeks to develop in students’ higher level thinking skills and creativity, he/she should give more focus and attention to the journey.
In the succeeding lessons, we shall examine examples of IT-based projects. These are:
Resource-based projects
Simple creations
Guided hyper-media projects
Web-based projects

But for now, let’s recap: LET’S TAKE THE JOURNEY TO HIGHER/COMPLEX THINKING SKILLS AND CREATIVITY for teaching-and-learning in an information age.