Higher-order thinking skills (or HOTS) are essentially critical thinking skills. Cultivating these types of skills represents the ultimate goal of the learning process because they demonstrate the student has reached a substantial degree of self-sufficiency as a thinker.

Higher-order thinking skills go beyond lower-order thinking skills like concept formation, basic reading comprehension, or rote memorization to include the abilities to analyze, synthesize, and evaluate information. As an example, lower-order thinking skills might help you with memorizing the correct answers for a multiple-choice test, but higher-order thinking skills are necessary to write an essay that makes a cogent argument.

The educational psychologist Benjamin Bloom deserves attribution for his initial insights into higher-order thinking skills. Teacher education programs often use Bloom’s taxonomy as portrayed in his Taxonomy of Educational Objectives: The Classification of Educational Goals. Bloom’s taxonomy is a pyramidal diagram representing how higher-level thinking skills build on lower-level ones to achieve learning objectives.

Learners acquire higher-order thinking skills when they learn how to extrapolate from information to form their own conclusions. Here are just five core HOTS to consider:

1. Analysis: After you learn to take in and categorize information, you can start to learn how to assess and analyze it. This might mean engaging in a Socratic discussion with other classmates or knowing the right questions to ask about what people are teaching you. Analysis means truly understanding what’s being said as an important first step to forming your own personal conclusion about the information.

2. Application: Beyond learning how to consume information, learners should know how to apply it in the real world. Application is a higher-order thinking skill that involves a student knowing how to apply old information to new situations both within and outside the classroom.

3. Evaluation: After classifying and analyzing information, learners can then evaluate whether or not they think it’s worthwhile in the first place. This might mean rejecting an argument as unsound, critiquing a literary text, or realizing the exact nature of a mathematical mistake. By reaching this level of thinking, students move beyond just taking in a lesson plan uncritically to forming nuanced opinions about the information.

4. Metacognition: This form of cognitive processing refers to self-awareness about your own thought processes. In a sense, metacognition is thinking about thinking. This leads to greater self-management of both emotional and rational processing. Next time you brainstorm something, try to think about how and why you brainstorm in the precise way you do. Once you do so, you will be exploring firsthand what metacognition is.

5. Synthesis: Eventually, learners should be able to tie together disparate content areas, disciplines, and information sources as effective mental organizers. Synthesizing information means knowing how things interconnect and why. When you synthesize what you learn, you form connections among various subjects that help you better understand the world and prepare yourself to learn still more about it.

Students’ higher-order thinking skills end up on display in various ways. These three are some of the main ways in which students’ abilities are put to the test:

1. Comparing and contrasting: In elementary school, a teacher might ask their students to come up with simple analogies and similes—a mere sentence or two explaining how one thing is like another. In high school and college, the same principle is at work in essay writing. For instance, a teacher or professor might ask for students to compare and contrast two entire novels with each other. In either format, students use their abilities to analyze, evaluate, and synthesize information.

2. Drawing conclusions: Consider a student who has to write a final term paper about the effect of a historical event on specific regions. They’ll need to look at the big picture, zoom in on granular details, form inferences, and put all of this into their own words. In doing so, they put many different higher-order thinking skills to work.

3. Problem-solving: Teachers hope to develop problem-solving skills as one of the most important learning outcomes for their students. When students know how to analyze, synthesize, or evaluate information, they can then apply that information to new problems. They can also think about their own attempts to solve problems in a metacognitive sense to see if there are any ways for them to improve in that way, too.