SKILLS REQUIRED AT THE LOWER ORDER OF THINKING 

• Lower order thinking is generally the easiest thinking category that requires little effort on the part of the brain. 

• Skills such as REMEMBERING and UNDERSTANDING are amongst the lower order thinking skills. 

• Remembering, for example only requires memorising or recalling, whereas understanding perhaps goes slightly deeper in requiring some ability to make sense. 

Lower order thinking skills generally have fewer dimensions. A large proportion of any given population can easily engage in remembering, recalling and understanding. The cognitive demand is low.

MIDDLE ORDER THINKING SKILLS

• The next tier is the middle level thinking. 

• Amongst these are skills of APPLICATION and ANALYSIS. 

• These skills are fairly sophisticated and require extra effort then simply remembering or understanding. 

• These skills also have many dimensions of thinking. 

• Analysing, for example requires some degree of comparison, organisation, and being able to break a whole into parts and then re-arranging the parts back into a whole again. 

• Analysing seeks to understand how unique individual parts make the system work as a whole.

HIGHER ORDER THINKING SKILLS

As thinking skills rise from the lower spectrum to the HIGHER LEVELS they increase in complexity and dimensions.

The HIGHER LEVELS of thinking are, therefore, generally achieved by the more intelligent thinkers.

• At the top of the tier are the highest order thinking skills such as Evaluating and Creating. 

• These skills require children to create new ideas, to provide creative solutions to complex problems, to think outside 'the box'. 

• Students are challenged to exercise a multitude of mental operations in deep and meaningful ways (like juggling several balls in the air). They do multi-dimensional thinking. 

• In doing so children become knowledge creators and inventors, and at the same time they apply sound principles to judge the wisdom imparted by others as well as develop empathy, resilience and cooperation.

Meta thinking is to metacognate or think about one's own thinking skills and processes. It is a reflective process where the thinker seeks to understand how they apply their thinking skills and whether they are effective thinkers. 

• They reflect on the principles they apply during thinking and problem solving. 

• They critically analyse their thinking and adapt their thinking behaviours to suit the problem at hand. 

Meta thinkers can recognise their brain's "settings" and how it affects their thinking applications during different moments of solving problems or creativity.

Metacognition is a powerful process that allows a learner or thinker to modify their learning behaviours deliberately and consciously. 

It is also a very complex process and does not just happen by chance. It is a process that needs to be taught explicitly and the principles of learning behaviours identified, labelled, explained and practiced.