The Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS)

What is meant by it? Let us think. Thinking about the Higher Order Thinking skill is itself a HOTS! Anyway we can't gainsay that we need to think before we act. Acting without thinking is just a folly we are advised to shun.
By skill we mean the ability to perform a task according to its requirements. Some requirements for performing a task are of general characters. Accordingly these are Domain General skills. Timeliness, cleanliness, tactfulness, interpersonal competence etc. belong to this category. Some skill requirements are task specific for the acquisition of which we need sufficient specialised education and training for job performance. These are called domain specific skill. The skill of a surgeon or a scientist or craftsman is domain specific.
But these skills are activity oriented skills and are results of our thinking skills.
Applying the concept underlying Bloom's Taxonomy, there exists the following hierarchy of thinking skills-
1. Remembering
2. Understanding
3. Applying
4. Analysing
5.Evaluating
6. Creating.
The first two are knowledge based, the middle two are application based while the last two are creative in nature and characters.
From the above, we can easily infer that Remembering and Understanding are lower order thinking skills as they enable a person to come to know about a certain fact that already exists in the domain of cognitive learning. Others already know the existence of that fact. Mentionable fact is that you too now happen to know this fact by sincere investment of time for such learning. Thus a beginner knows Newton's Laws of Motion through remembering and comprehending. Upon repeated remembering and comprehending these laws when he applies them towards solving a problem, the thinking skills for such task performance are 'Apply' followed by 'Analyse'. Through these skills we become enabled to solve a problem. Hence these middle order thinking skills are Solution Oriented. We stand capacitated to solve a problem. We happen to solve it because we are in the full knowledge of the various parts and components of the whole and Non- functional or Dysfunctional behaviour of any part of the whole is corrected by replacement of sorts depending upon proficiency of thinking skills of lower and middle orders.
But Higher Order Skill is different. By dint of these skills we not only solve the problem but we create an altogether different things that has the capacity to replace an existing fact, thing or concept with a new one.
Hence HOTS is a critical thinking skill having the potential to change the existing paradigm. It is a type of creative thinking that gives birth to a new idea, concept or a technology.
We should develop it by questioning the status quo if we feel endowed with this quality of thinking which is both acquired and inherited existing in different combinations in different people.
R.R. Prabhakar.
01.06.2019.