Analysis of Students' Learning Performance - Research Paper Example

While most post-graduate students will receive HOTS training as a natural part of their post-graduate training, it is questionable whether current undergraduate students are achieving the higher-level of thinking skills needed to be competitive in today's and tomorrow’s occupations. Determining the population’s current level of thinking skills is important in order to formulate any national or institutional improvement plans. One way of determining the level of thinking skills is by analyzing students’ posed questions (e.g. Chin, 2001; Dori & Herscovitz, 1999; Zohar & Dori, 2003; Brookhart, 2014).

Several of these studies demonstrated students were able to pose quality questions even at the HOTS level but none of the reviewed studies were able to show that students can clearly differentiate between a HOTS and a lower-order thinking skills (LOTS) type of question (see Chin, 2001; Dori & Herscovitz, 1999; Zohar & Dori, 2003). The ability to differentiate HOTS and LOTS type of questions is an important skill as it indicates students’ ability to systematically find and use acquired knowledge to generate new ideas or solutions beyond mere recall (Mohammad Shah, Ahmad Jelani, Noor Aida & Nor Hissam, 2012).

To illustrate the importance of a student’s ability to differentiate between HOTS and LOTS of questions, it is helpful to look at one of these studies in more depth. In a 2012 study by Mohammad Shah, forty undergraduate students were asked to complete a HOTS assignment using an educational software application called KAJI. KAJI can seamlessly collect data while students perform the assignment (Mohammad Shah et al., 2012). The results of the study showed that although students were in fact able to pose HOTS and LOTS questions, it was not conclusive that the students were certain whether the questions were really HOTS level questions or not (Mohammad Shah et al., 2012). This indicates a gap in the training current students are receiving that, once filled, might improve their questioning and metacognitive skills to a higher level.