Higher-Level Thinking Skills

What Parents Can Do to Encourage These Skills

1.    INTERPRETING means explaining or showing what something means.

Cut out graphs, charts, tables, etc., from a newspaper or magazine.  Ask your child to interpret the graphic.  Give a prize for the effort.

2.    EXPLAINING means making something clear and understandable.

Inquire how things compare and contrast (are alike and are different).

3.    EVALUATING means judging, arguing, or estimating; expressing an opinion.

Routinely ask your child’s opinion on a subject or topic.

4.    PREDICTING means foretelling or declaring beforehand; making a prediction.

Ask your child what he or she feels is going to happen.

5.    OBSERVING means watching, paying attention to, or noticing.

On a trip, ask your child to explain what he or she sees or notices.

6.    ANALYZING means studying in detail; determining the evidence; breaking down a subject, separating the parts, and examining their relationship to each other.

Frequently inquire of your child how parts or elements of something studied fit together.

7.    CLASSIFYING means grouping into sections or categories; sorting or placing into classes.

Ask your child to tell you into what groups certain items should be placed or arranged.

8.    SYNTHESIZING means pulling together; assembling into a whole; solving, planning, proposing, or constructing.

Ask your child what he or she learned from a specific experience or school project.

9.    COMPREHENDING means describing or grasping; understanding; comparing and contrasting; explaining in one’s own words.

Ask your child what the author, speaker, presenter, teacher, or friend meant by what he or she said or did.

10.   HYPOTHESIZING means assuming something for the sake of an argument; proposing a theory, explaining something.

Present this scene to your child: “What if you did …..?  What do you think would happen?”

11.   MENTAL TRACKING OUT LOUD means talking to oneself.

Push your child to recite what he or she is mentally going through in figuring out an answer or problem.  Reciting experiences help to vitalize thought processes.  Say, “Tell me what you were thinking and how you arrived at that.”