READING AND HIGHER ORDER THINKING SKILLS

The ultimate goal of reading is comprehension. Comprehension means understanding or making inferences from what you have read.

When learners read for comprehension, they engage in several complex cognitive processes. The learners are using their phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and reading strategies to construct meaning from the text.

Reading comprehension is a complex process; therefore, learners do not develop the ability to comprehend texts quickly, easily or without explicit instruction. It is important to help them develop critical thinking skills.

Critical thinking skills are ways of thinking about topics or content in novel and insightful ways. The good news is that critical thinking skills can be developed over time with explicit instruction. One of the ways to do this is to use Bloom's taxonomy.

Bloom’s Taxonomy is a widely-used tool for writing lesson objectives and learning standards. It provides a variety of outcomes pupils are expected to display to demonstrate that learning has occurred.

To assess true reading comprehension skills, it must reach across the levels of the cognitive domain.

It is not enough to be able to remember information, learners need to use that information. With the right types of questions, educators can help learners reach a higher cognitive level.

Let's take a read aloud activity as an example. The class has decided to read the book titled 'Goldilocks and the Three Bears'

During the pre reading activity, The teacher displays some pictures in the text and asks learners to guess what the story is about. Display a set of keywords and a set of related images then ask learners to match the words to the picture and give a definition of each keyword.

This activity connects to the first two levels in Bloom's taxonomy (Remember and Understand)

During the reading activity, the teacher reads and pauses to explain concepts and ask for feedback from the learners. They are asked questions such as, 'What question would you ask Goldilocks if you could? They can be asked to replace a word in the story with a word of their own. Asking them to look for certain key facts and so on. These questions connect to the second and third levels in the taxonomy (Understand and Apply).

During the post-reading activity, learners can be asked questions such as 'Which event could have happened if the three Bears did not meet Goldilocks at home?', 'How would you have reacted if your meal had been eaten by a stranger?

These questions connect to the fourth and fifth levels in the taxonomy (analyse, evaluate)

The final level which is 'create' can be used as a final assessment for pupils. They can be asked to create an alternative ending to the story of Goldilocks and the three Bears.

It is important to note that the levels in the taxonomy are not mutually exclusive of each other and so one might find an overlap between neighbouring levels.

A great way to ensure that all levels are captured is to divide them into each section of the lesson plan. 'Knowledge' and 'understand' are great lesson starters, apply and analyse can be combined or split between the guided and independent practice while evaluate and create can be used in the assessment stage. This is not to say that assessments are not used to measure learning progress across other levels.