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Introduction
The language of education is rife with talk about teaching higher order thinking skills. What exactly are these skills? And how can they best be taught? These are important and difficult questions. All too frequently educators have elected to take the easy way out. They have settled for having students memorize Bloom's taxonomy. "In the minds of many educators," Ennis (1987) informs us, "Bloom's top three levels (analysis, synthesis, and evaluation) are the higher order thinking skills" (p. 10). Though the taxonomy may serve many useful purposes, teaching higher order thinking is not one of them. If the nation's children are to learn how to think clearly and cogently, they must be provided with appropriate instruction.
How well are the nation's schools responding to the challenge of teaching higher order thinking? Quellmalz (1987) believes their performance leaves much to be desired. "Schools ' commitment to higher order thinking has been largely rhetorical, while curriculum development has been infrequent and ineffective" (p. 86). In most classrooms higher order thinking receives little or no attention.
"When higher order questions do occur, they often concern specific, isolated skills; they seldom ask students to sustain a line of reasoning in order to draw a conclusion or explain a judgment" (p. 94). Quellmalz concludes his dismal assessment by saying: "We have mountains of test data to document that most students of all ages do not perform well on higher order tasks" (p. 95).
Before something can be taught, educators must first decide what it is they wish to teach. What is higher order thinking? Ennis (1987) believes the concept is fraught with ambiguity, "too vague to provide the schools and colleges with specific guidance" (p. 10). He does concede, however, that the concept has served to remind us there is more to learning than the mere memorization of facts and figures. Ennis concludes his analysis of the matter by reminding us that "to teach higher order thinking skills one needs criteria for making such judgments" (p. 11).
Teaching higher order thinking is generally accepted as one of the objectives of public education. The problem arises from the fact that no one seems to know exactly what the concept means. In the absence of a good working definition, let us...