How Higher Levels of Thinking are Developed

Behaviorism has contributed knowledge of how higher levels of thinking are developed including learning taxonomies for cognitive, psychomotor, and affective domains of learning. For instance, the cognitive domain includes skills such as recalling specific facts, patterns, and concepts. Mainly, the affective domain includes how people deal with their emotions, such as emotions, values, appreciation, passion, motivations, and point of views. In addition, psychomotor domain includes a range of skills: Motor skills, coordination, and movement. These learning domains contribute to Bloom’s taxonomy of educational objectives, which include six levels of intellectual behavior (Stavredes, 2011). Randie

Higher Order Thinking Skills/Lower Order Thinking Skills 

• Evaluation (assess effectiveness of concepts and conduct a comparison and review of information)
• Synthesis (create or build models or structures based on information)
• Analysis (interpret organizational principles or relevance of information)
• Application (apply the information learned to real life situations)
• Comprehension (understand and interpret the meaning of information)
• Knowledge (recall or recognize information) Randie

Figure 2: Higher Order Thinking Skills/Lower Order Thinking Skills Google Images, 2013

Note: the link to additional information about cognitive, affective, and psychomotor is listed below. 

http://www.nwlink.com/~donclark/hrd/bloom.html

http://www.businessballs.com/bloomstaxonomyoflearningdomains.htm