Discovery Education provides multiple resources that support going beyond recall, memorization, and basic understanding to engage students in higher-order thinking skills like applying, analyzing, evaluating, and creating.
In Bloom’s Taxonomy, a trusted model to consider when encouraging students to think at a higher level—the levels that provide the greatest opportunities for students to engage in higher-order thinking are:
- Applying: allows information learned to be used in new context
- Analyzing: making connections and drawing conclusions
- Evaluating/Design: critical/creative thinking, includes bias, accuracy, core themes, evidence to support opinions, validity of information in order to use it yourself
- Creating/Synthesizing: combining information from multiple sources and contexts to create something new
Discovery Education provides multiple resources that support applying, analyzing, evaluating/design, and synthesizing. Rich multimodal content, instructional strategies, and digital tools allow students to develop these higher-order thinking skills.
Multimodal Content
Videos, images, songs, speeches, podcasts, and reading passages provide many opportunities for students to analyze and evaluate content as well as its sources.
Discovery Education also provides opportunities for students to synthesize information by creating multimedia texts. Students can create their own videos to communicate original ideas using Discovery Education editable videos. When a video is editable, students and teachers know they have the rights to mix that content to make something of their own, like adding their narration to communicate a new idea, green-screening to make themselves part of the story, or remixing different media types to formulate an argument.
The Ignite My Future Content Collection provides lesson plans that support higher order thinking skills and can serve as a springboard for teachers to create their own lessons. Much like critical thinking, computational thinking is a higher-level process whereby students can decipher problems and form innovative solutions.
Instructional Strategies
Spotlight on Strategies (SOS) are easy-to-implement, high-engagement, research-based instructional strategies that provide many opportunities for students to engage in higher-order thinking.
The SOS Top 10 for 4Cs: Encouraging Critical Thinking and Problem-Solving (Canadian Subscribers) are instructional ideas that provide a framework to help students practice and perfect their critical thinking skills, including effective reasoning, systems thinking, making judgements and decisions, and solving problems.
Discovery Education Studio
Discovery Education Studio provides students and teachers with a platform that dynamically allows higher-order thinking skills to be developed in students.
- Students can practice applying what they have learned with tasks that have been incorporated into a board or slideshow created by a teacher.
- Teachers can create boards or slideshows that support students analyzing information from various multimodal resources and evaluating their value as they design their own board.
- Synthesizing learning by creating boards allows students to incorporate multimedia information from multiple sources, including Discovery Education content as well as their own content and artifacts, like videos, images, illustrations, and original text.
Learn more about Studio.