Assessment of Problem Solving and Higher Order Thinking

Higher order thinking and problem-solving skills have been important educational goals for over a century, but the need for these skills has become even greater during the last few decades. A number of recent studies suggests that each generation needs to use and apply higher order thinking and problem solving to a greater extent than the generation before, largely due to the globalization and computerization of our societies and economies. Therefore, many educators and scholars in the field of education contend that one of the most urgent goals of education is to equip students with higher order thinking and problem-solving skills. However, as these skills go beyond the mere reproduction of knowledge, instead requiring thoughtful application of knowledge in various contexts, their assessment implies a number of challenges mainly related to the difficulty in elaborating standardized, but ecologically valid, assessment situations that show the required degree of complexity necessary for the application of higher order thinking and problem-solving skills. A reliable and valid assessment of higher order thinking and problem-solving skills is nevertheless of utmost importance as it constitutes a necessary first step in comprehensively incorporating these skills into education, making them visible and allowing for understanding and targeted intervention in a second step.

This entry defines higher order thinking (HOT) and problem-solving skills and describes the relation between them. It further explains the role of educational technology in the assessment of HOT and problem solving especially for the setup of the required complex assessment environments. It concludes by discussing implications of problem solving and higher order thinking for education and by outlining future developments.

Education about a century ago had little to do with equipping students with skills such as higher order thinking or problem solving and was more concerned with communicating factual knowledge. As of today, this situation has changed considerably. In modern educational systems, it is an explicit goal of many educational systems and school curricula to increase students’ level of HOT and to make them good problem solvers, thereby going beyond the mere learning of facts and simple concepts.

The official integration of HOT into education began in the late 1940s as a result of a series of conferences on educational curricula. After meeting several times over a few years, a committee of educators proposed a theoretical framework of several thinking skills. These thinking skills were considered to be of high importance for education and subsequently promoted as important learning objectives that were to be integrated into national school curricula. The framework cumulated in a taxonomy, which was named after the chairman of the committee that developed it, Benjamin Bloom, and became known as Bloom’s taxonomy.

Bloom’s taxonomy comprehensively considers cognitive, affective, and psychomotor aspects as educational objectives, but most attention has been paid to the cognitive domain. Specifically, the taxonomy assumes a hierarchy of thinking skills (and cognitive processes associated with them) with the skills on the higher levels being referred to as HOT skills. According to the taxonomy, relevant thinking skills are knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. A sketch of the taxonomy is displayed in Figure 1. Originally, learning at a higher level presumed mastering all skills on lower levels, but revised versions of Bloom’s taxonomy abandoned the notion of such direct dependencies and avoid a clear hierarchy among the skills. That is, while analysis, synthesis, and evaluation usually are considered HOT skills (and the other three usually are not), no hierarchical relations between these skills are explicitly postulated.

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