THINKING SKILLS PRINCIPLES

November 24, 2016


WHAT IS THE THINKING PRINCIPLE?

     Corporations are constantly looking for opportunities to improve their workforce.  One skill that is constantly addressed to every university releasing a new set of graduates is that students need to have the ability to adapt to all types of challenging environments.  They need to be flexible and be able to adjust to new situations. For this reason corporations are looking for ways to improve their staff's thinking strategies.  There are three styles of thinking skills.  They are critical, creative and metacognition. Creative thinking skills focus on developing new and useful ideas.  Critical thinking skills involve reviewing various products and ideas.  Finally, metacognition involves planning, monitoring and evaluating a product or its ideas.  According to Clarke and Mayer, a successful program focuses on building a specific set of thinking skills.  In addition, you will find social learning strategies and collaboration incorporated into the program.

    The following are four guidelines offered by Clarke and Mayer when creating an effective program.

Principle 1: Focus on job specific and metacognitive skills:
This particular principle supports providing job specific skill training into your program.

Principle 2: Consider a whole task course design.
This principle reinforces teaching skills in the context of a real life working scenario.  This can also be experienced in a virtual world setting. There are 3 forms of whole task course designs.  They are Problem Centered, Guided Learning and Inductive Learning.

Principle 3: Make thinking processes explicit.
This focuses on allowing the thinking processes to be more visible.  Students should view thinking processes performed by experts. They should also be required to demonstrate why they chose a particular course of action.

Principle 4: Define job specific thinking processes.
This thinking process should include research tools, activities and data sources that reflect on-the-job procedures.

Principle 2: Demonstrated (or not)
Edheads is a wonderful educational resource for teachers as they begin to build critical thinking skills among their students using math and science activities.  Here they offer games that allow students to implement what they would do in a real life medical scenario, one of which is called the Virtual Hip Resurfacing game.  Students are given a problem and then provided instruction on what to do.  They can then perform the procedure on a patient.  While this is not a real life activity, the circumstances offer a virtual world setting for students to complete the task assigned.

Edheads Critical Thinking Website

REFERENCES

Clark, R. C., & Mayer, R. E. (2011). E-learning and the science of instruction: Proven guidelines for consumers and designmers of multimedia learning. San Francisco: Pfeiffer