The LOT’s and HOT’s for Assessment
I have never been a huge fan of examinations. In fact, many current forms of assessment leave me cold. We are required to assess our students; to measure their progress, to track their learning, to identify weakness and perhaps to measure our own performance as educators.
But do they do our students justice?
We know that in the knowledge economy of the 21st Century, Higher order thinking skills are valued and are indeed essential. But, do our assessments reflect higher or lower order thinking?
If we look at Bloom’s Digital Taxonomy or perhaps its simplified cousin the Art Costa’s Three Story Intellect, many of the verbs we associate with examination and test questions reflect lower order thinking skills.
| Bloom’s Digital Taxonomy |
Art Costa’s three story intellect |
|
|---|---|---|
| Lower Order Thinking | ||
| Remembering | Recognising, Listing, Describing, Identifying, Retrieving, naming, Locating, Finding, bullet pointing, highlighting, bookmarking, social networking, social bookmarking, favouriting/local bookmarking, searching & googling. |
Gathering information Count, Define, Match, Observe, Select, Describe, Identify, List, Observe, Name & Recite. |
| Understanding | Interpreting, Summarising, inferring, paraphrasing, classifying, comparing, explaining, exemplifying, advanced searches, Boolean searches, blog journaling, twittering, catergorising, tagging, commenting, annotating & subscribing. | Processing information
Analyse, Categorise, Compare/Contrast, Explain, Infer, Make, Analogies, Sequence, Synthesize & Sort. |
| Applying | Implementing, carrying out, using, executing, running, loading, playing, operating, hacking, uploading, sharing & editing. | |
| Analysing | Comparing, organising, deconstructing, attributing, outlining, finding, structuring, integrating, mashing, linking, validating, reverse engineering & cracking. | |
| Evaluating | Checking, hypothesising, critiquing, experimenting, judging, testing, detecting, monitoring, blog commenting/critiquing, reviewing, posting, moderating, collaborating, networking, refactoring & testing. | Applying Information.
Apply a principle, Evaluate, Forecast, Hypothesize, Imagine, Assess, Predict, Speculate, Judge, if/then, Idealize & Generalise. |
| Creating | Designing, constructing, planning, producing, inventing, devising, making, programming, filming, animating, blogging video blogging, mixing, re-mixing, wiki-ing, publishing, videocasting, podcasting, directing & broadcasting | |
| Higher Order Thinking | ||
What are the key verbs we use in our examinations.
- list (Remembering)
- state (Remembering)
- identify (Remembering)
- name (Remembering)
- describe (Remembering)
- comment (Understanding)
- discuss (Understanding)
- explain (Understanding)
- exemplify (Understanding)
- compare (Analyse)
- analyse (Analyse)
- evaluate (Evaluate)
These are predominently lower order thinking skills.
Does a one, two or three hour examination, sat in isolation from information sources and reference give a student adequate time to develop analysis, evaluate and be creative? To reflect critically on a year or mores work? Is it realistic to expect a student to complete these in close book format, when in the “real world” they would have a plethera of resources at their finger tips?
Examinations are a poor tool to measure higher order thinking.
Fortunately, examinations are not the only form of assessment we use with our students, but do the other types of assessment actually reflect Higher Order Thinking. Do the assessment tasks reflect the higher order goals and objectives or are they more of the same. Do we put suitable emphasis on:
- developing a hypothesis (Evaluating)
- experimenting (Evaluating)
- planning (Creating)
- designing (Creating)
- judging and evaluating (Evaluating)
- producing and making (Creating)
- critiquing, reviewing and testing (Evaluating)
- refining (Creating)
- mixing and remixing (Creating)
These can not be tested adequately in an examination or test
