Higher-order thinking is not about regurgitation of information, it is not about rote learning or simple remembering or recall of facts. It is about engaging students at the highest levels of thinking to foster exciting learning environments where students become creators of new ideas, analysers of information and generators of knowledge. Higher-order thinking can be typified by the top three levels of Bloom's Revised Taxonomy (Analysing, Evaluating, Creating). At this higher level, student thinking looks like designing, constructing, planning, producing, inventing, checking, hypothesising, critiquing, experimenting, judging, comparing, organising, deconstructing, interrogating and finding.
To further clarify, A Guide to Productive Pedagogies: Classroom reflection manual states that:
Higher-order thinking by students involves the transformation of information and ideas. This transformation occurs when students combine facts and ideas and synthesise, generalise, explain, hypothesise or arrive at some conclusion or interpretation. Manipulating information and ideas through these processes allows students to solve problems, gain understanding and discover new meaning. When students engage in the construction of knowledge, an element of uncertainty is introduced into the instructional process and the outcomes are not always predictable; in other words, the teacher is not certain what the students will produce. In helping students become producers of knowledge, the teacher’s main instructional task is to create activities or environments that allow them opportunities to engage in higher-order thinking.
(Department of Education, Queensland, 2002, p. 1)
A guide to Productive Pedagogies: Classroom reflection manual also lists three degrees of incorporation of Higher-order thinking skills in a “Continuum of practice”:
1. Students are engaged only in lower-order thinking; i.e. they receive, or recite, or participate in routine practice. In no activities during the lesson do students go beyond simple reproduction of knowledge.
2. Students are primarily engaged in routine lower-order thinking for a good share of the lesson. There is at least one significant question or activity in which some students perform some higher-order thinking.
3. Almost all students, almost all of the time are engaged in higher-order thinking.
(Department of Education, Queensland, 2002, p. 1)