Thinking skills – Teaching & Learning Research Initiative

Exploring student thinking, problem solving and collaboration in iPad-supported learning environments

Introduction Despite successive waves of technological innovation being rapidly adopted by schools, teaching methods and curriculum designs have been slow to evolve in response to the affordances offered by an increasing array of digital devices (Cuban, 2017). This phenomenon is not new, with articles dating back to the early 1980s when digital devices were beginning to appear in our classrooms, commenting that educational computing is following the well-trodden path of other “educational innovations (which) seem doomed to follow a cycle of unrealistic expectations, followed by disappointment, disillusionment, and abandonment” (Maddux, 1986, p. 27). Maddux (1986) terms this the “pendulum syndrome” (p. 27), that centres on education’s susceptibility to “fad and fashion

Moving a school: Higher order thinking through SOLO and e-Learning

Introduction Technological, social and economic change is encouraging increasing emphasis on the development of higher order thinking skills throughout the world and they are being incorporated into national curriculum goals in many countries, including New Zealand. Simultaneously the use of digital technologies is being promoted by many educators and authorities in this country and elsewhere as an approach that will enable students to develop these skills. An increasingly popular tool for identifying higher order thinking is the SOLO (Structure of Observed Learning Outcomes) taxonomy (Biggs & Collis, 1982). This taxonomy describes the complexity of student responses to questions or tasks, and also can be applied to the questions or tasks themselves.