IT for Higher Order Thinking Skills and Creativity

In the traditional absorption model of teaching, the teacher organizes and presents information to student – learners.

This teaching approach has been proven successful for achieving learning outcomes following the lower end of Bloom’s taxonomy: Knowledge, comprehension, and application are concerned.

Challenge for today’s learners – this is not simply to achieve learning objectives but to encourage the development of students who can do more than receive, recall, recite, and apply the knowledge they have acquired.

Learners today are expected to be not only cognitive, but also flexible, analytical and creative.

Higher Level Thinking

Outcomes

The modern day teacher is now guided on the goal of helping the students achieve higher level thinking skills and creativity beyond the ordinary benchmark of the student’s passing, even excelling achievement tests.

The Project Method for Higher Learning Outcomes

It consists in having the students work on projects with depth, complexity, duration and relevance to the real world.

This new method involves students in the active creation of information, such that there is sustained reflective thinking on topics that have a real-world quality to them.

There is a tighter link between the use of projects for simply coming up with products to having the students undergo the process of complex/higher thinking framework of the constructivist paradigm.

Under this framework, it is the students, not the teacher, make decisions about what to put into the project, how to organize information, how to package the outcomes for presentation, and the like.

Meanwhile, the teacher, without staying away from the project endeavor, guides and facilitates the learning process.

The Process

The process of project implementation takes the students to the steps, efforts, and experiences in project completion. Thus we have to bear this in mind:

THE PROCESS IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN THE OUTPUT.

The process refers to the thinking/affective/psychomotor process that occurs on the part of the learner.

This comprises the journey that actualizes learning.

The product is the result of this all-important process.The product can be a summary, a poster, an essay, a

term paper, a dramatic presentation or an IT-based product.

Thank you for

listening!

By: Eileen B. Aycardo and Mark Lester C. Perez