A working definition of cognitive psychology is the study of psychology related to the mental process of knowing including the aspects of awareness, perception, reasoning and judgment. The study of the nature of various mental tasks including as memory, and associative learning and the processes that enable them to be performed. According to the Tasmania Department of Education website, Benjamin Bloom's cognitive taxonomy identifies six levels of thinking in increasing order of intellectual demand are:
knowledge; remembering or recalling appropriate, previously learned information
comprehension; grasping or understanding the meaning of informational materials.
application; applying previously learned information (or knowledge) to new and unfamiliar situations.
analysis; involves the ability to interpret, classify, analyze, arrange, differentiate, group, compare, organize, contrast, examine, scrutinize, survey, categorize, dissect, probe, inventory, investigate, question, discover, text, inquire, distinguish, detect, diagram, inspect
synthesis; involves the ability to compose, setup, plan, prepare, propose, imagine, produce, hypothesize, invent, incorporate, develop, generalize, design, originate, formulate, predict, arrange, contrive, assemble, concoct, construct, systematize, create and
evaluation; which involves the ability to judge, assess, decide, measure, appraise, estimate, evaluate, infer, rate, deduce, compare, score, value, predict, revise, choose, conclude, recommend, select, determine, criticize.
According to the University of North Carolina at Charlotte website, a great deal of the work in regular classrooms focuses on the first three levels listed above, with much less emphasis on providing students with opportunities to engage with the three highest levels. Therefore, one way to enhance higher thinking skills is to encourage students to use these top three thinking skills. Techniques to do so incl...