Level 3 – Literacy Demands within the VELS: Thinking Processes
Interdisciplinary Learning
Thinking Processes
The standards for Thinking Processes at Level 3 of the VELS have the literacy skills that students are required to demonstrate to achieve these standards identified in bold.
Standards
Reasoning, processing and inquiry
At Level 3, students collect information from a range of sources to answer their own and others’ questions. They question the validity of sources when appropriate. They apply thinking strategies to organise information and concepts in a variety of contexts, including problem solving activities. They provide reasons for their conclusions.
Creativity
At Level 3, students apply creative ideas in practical ways and test the possibilities of ideas they generate. They use open-ended questioning and integrate available information to explore ideas.
Reflection, evaluation and metacognition
At Level 3, students identify strategies they use to organise their ideas, and use appropriate language to explain their thinking. They identify and provide reasons for their point of view, and justify changes in their thinking.
Introduction to the domain
Our world and the world of the future demand that all students are supported to become effective and skilful thinkers. Thinking validates existing knowledge and enables individuals to create new knowledge and to build ideas and make connections between them. It entails reasoning and inquiry together with processing and evaluating information. It enables the exploration of perceptions and possibilities. It also involves the capacity to plan, monitor and evaluate one’s own thinking, and refine and transform ideas and beliefs.
The Thinking Processes domain encompasses a range of cognitive, affective and metacognitive knowledge, skills and behaviours which are essential for students to function effectively in society, both within and beyond school.
An explicit focus on thinking and the teaching of thinking skills aims to develop students’ thinking to a qualitatively higher level. Students need to be supported to move beyond the lower-order cognitive skills of recall and comprehension to the development of higher-order processes required for creative problem solving, decision making and conceptualising. In addition, they need to develop the capacity for metacognition – the capacity to reflect on and manage their own thinking. This can only happen if the school and classroom culture values and promotes thinking and if students are provided with sufficient time to think, reflect, and engage in sustained discussion, deliberation and inquiry. Students need challenging tasks which stimulate, encourage and support skilful and effective thinking.
A focus on the development of thinking competencies within specific areas of the curriculum and across it not only serves as a core integrative function, it also has the potential to provide continuity in approaches to learning from Prep to Year 10 and to emphasise the view that such knowledge, skills and behaviours are important to lifelong learning. To emphasise this, teachers model skilful and effective thinking and make their own thinking explicit as part of their everyday practice.
Thinking skills can be defined in a variety of ways. Many different taxonomies and models for teaching thinking have been developed. Each classification scheme has its strengths and weaknesses. However, whatever the system or systems being used, all seek to improve the quality of student thinking.
Learning focus level 3
As students work towards the achievement of Level 3 standards in Thinking Processes, they explore aspects of their natural, constructed and social world, wondering and developing questions about it. They use a range of sources of information including observations and findings from their own investigations to answer these questions. Students develop strategies for organising and summarising information and reflecting on their thinking. They begin to categorise knowledge and ideas, identify patterns, and form generalisations. They learn to make connections between both new and established ideas and their own knowledge.
With thinking tools to assist them, students begin to ask more focused and clarifying questions. They develop skills in collecting and organising ideas from a range of sources to construct knowledge. They learn to question the validity of sources, communicate and record their questions, responses and thoughts, and give reasons for conclusions.
Students participate in a variety of investigations and activities involving problem solving that encourage them to experiment with a range of creative solutions. They begin to reflect on the approaches they use to assist them to form their solutions. They explore ideas creatively; for example, by engaging with new ideas and other perspectives.
Students give reasons for changes that may occur in their thinking. They begin to recognise that others may have different opinions and understand that reasoning can be influenced by strong feelings. They begin to question arguments presented to them; for example, those based on the assertion that ‘everybody knows’ or ‘I just know’.
Students develop language to describe specific thinking processes and, with support, use thinking tools to assist them to complete a given task. They continue to reflect regularly on their thinking, learning to describe their thinking processes verbally.