Skills Among Students by Marichelle G. Dones, MA (January, 2007)

The key to achieving the goals of education through the various school subjects is the acquisition and continuous development of thinking skills. Thinking skills refer to the set of basic and advanced skills and subskills that governs a person’s mental processes. These skills consists of knowledge, dispositions, cognitive, and even metacognitive operations. Cognition is the biological/neurological processes of the brain that facilitate thought while metacognition is the process of planning, assessing, and monitoring one’s own thinking. Students should learn how to think. Their teachers should know how to think themselves. In school, students CAN learn to think better if their teachers will concentrate on teaching them HOW to do so. The school curriculum should have all the provisions for the development of thinking skills.

Every subject in the school curriculum has specific purpose to accomplish-math for numeracy skills, language for communicative competence, and social sciences subjects such as history,economics and civics and culture specifically for developing thinking skills.

Why is it imperative for all schools to make sure that thinking skills are developed in every classroom nowadays? With the rapid changes going on in this technologically oriented world, the advances in information technology, the inevitable worldwide knowledge explosion brought about by computerization, and the easy access to information through the internet and electronic communication, learners must have the capacity to process information critically.

What exactly is critical thinking (CT)? How does one think critically? Can critical thinking be developed? Beyer (1985) defines critical thinking as the process of determining the authenticity, accuracy, and worth of information or knowledge claims. Hudgins and Edelman (1986) postulate that CT is the disposition to provide evidence in support of one’s conclusions and to request evidence from others before accepting their conclusions. The cognitive skills of analysis, interpretation, inference, explanation, evaluation, self-regulation or monitoring, and correcting one’s own reasoning are at the heart of critical thinking.

Critical thinkers think effectively. Teachers should be alert in noting the difference between those who do ordinary thinking and critical thinking. While ordinary thinkers simply guess, judge without criteria, or offer opinions without reasons, critical thinkers estimate, infer logically, give opinions with reasons, and make judgements based on sound criteria.

If we are to help students develop effective thinking skills, we need to move beyond asking questions that require memorization or mere recall of facts. Benjamin Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives (1972) became a popular guide in infusing higher-level questioning into daily lessons in the classroom. Applying Bloom’s Six Levels of Cognition to our teaching can be helpful in promoting higher- level thinking skills among our students.

Teachers will greatly help students if they will opt to make a paradigm shift and contribute to their students’learning strength through activities that develop thinking skills. These learning activities and experiences fall under five categories:


Knowledge and comprehension check-up
Critical thinking Creative thinking
Research skills
Application activities

Fortunately, a set of instructional materials that feature all these is now available for the teachers and their students. It is up to them to respond to the task of making the learners think better by teaching them HOW TO THINK.