Chapter 2: An Overview of Thinking Skills

This chapter provides an overview of different types of thinking skills, as well as a summary of recent research on the development, teaching, and assessment of thinking skills. Terms such as thinking, critical thinking, higher order thinking, and reflective thinking are used often, but rarely defined because there are a myriad of cognitive skills that contribute to sophisticated thinking. Similarly, much of the available research focuses on some specific aspect of thinking such as planning, strategy selection and implementation, and metacognitive monitoring, rather than thinking as an integrated cognitive activity. We believe there is a large, systematic literature on a variety of reasoning and thinking skills that promote higher order thinking. Moreover, although these skills have been studied in a wide variety of domains, there is strong reason to believe that they affect thinking in similar ways across domains in a manner that allows researchers and teachers to discuss these skills in a domain-general fashion (Leighton & Sternberg, 2004).