Higher order skills and knowledge domains

From Stellar Deliverable 1.1

‘The skills of enquiry, analysis, synthesis, collaboration, knowledge negotiation, evaluation, communication, are the high-level cognitive skills that we all need as citizens and as a workforce’ (Kaleidoscope Report (Laurillard et al., 2007) p 4)

“ [ ] develop specific competences related to thinking out of the box, creativity, asking the right questions, leadership” (Pro-learn Roadmap (Kamtsiou et al., 2008) p 13).

It is generally accepted that it is important for students to develop higher order skills, (Bloom & Engelhart, 1956) . Teaching higher order skills is one of the challenges the educational community has been facing for a long time and the orchestration of the best ways in which to do this is important if the educational community is to meet this challenge. The discussion below concerns these skills and issues related to teaching them. Higher order skills and learning are meta-cognitive abilities related to making connections, transferring knowledge, transforming knowledge and reflecting on learning. They include skills of search, evaluation and retrieval, and it could be argued that the increased use of technology is provoking people to use such higher order skills (Wegerif, 2002). At the same time, it is possible that digital technologies can be used to develop these skills (Hopson et al., 2001) and TEL researchers are building tools that support these skills (for example, metAHEAD, see McLoughlin & Hollingworth, 2002)).

One reason why attempts to teach metacognitive skills has often been disappointing relates to the paradox of teaching, turning metacognitive skills into explicit objects of teaching and learning deprives them of their metacognitive nature . Indeed in the process of ‘teaching’ they become ‘pieces of knowledge’ of the first order, and in this respect they become explicit. In this process new areas of implicitness are generated. But still the problem, the paradox, is there: the more you teach higher order skills and knowledge the more they are learned as first order skills and knowledge which themselves need their metacognitive environment (one may call that their control structure). Educators need to make progress on proposing solutions, but it cannot be by explicit teaching or training, rather by understanding which interactions, situations and practices favour the emergence of higher order skills without reifying them for educational purposes. It is interesting from this point of view to look back to the work on problem solving, metacognition and heuristics at the end of the 70s.

Moreover, certain higher order skills are domain specific, others are not. But the learning problem is the same. It might be easier to model and propose solutions in the case of domain specific higher order skills, for example although you can teach argumentation, the impact on the learning of mathematical proof is not straightforward.

Given the important role of assessment it is suggested that there is a need for higher order skills to be assessed, although as the discussions above suggest this is clearly a challenge.

The discussion above has been concerned with formal (classroom learning), but we recognise that there is a big difference between learning in formal and more informal settings. In informal learning situations, who decides what is core knowledge? We should also consider knowledge building in informal/formal groups and understand how such processes work within ‘Science 2.0’. It seems to be important to understand issues related to assessing higher order skills in informal learning.

Research questions include:

• Most educational institutions have fixed separate subject structures. Is it possible to learn higher order skills within these structures?

• Which higher order skills are particularly important within TEL?

• How can higher order skills be assessed in both formal and informal learning situations and what is the role of TEL in this respect?

• How can TEL contribute to the teaching and learning of higher order skills?