Thinking skills

Thinking skills are the mental activities you use to process information, solve problems, make decisions, and create new ideas. 

You use these skills when you try to make sense of experiences, make connections, ask questions, make plans, or organize information. 

 

 

About Thinking Skills

Thinking refers to the process of creating a logical series of connective facets between items of information.  Often times, thinking just happens automatically.  However, there are times when you consciously think.  It may be about how to solve a problem or making a decision.   Thinking enables you to connect and integrate new experiences into your existing understanding and perception of how things are. 

The simplest skills are learning facts and recall, while higher order skills include analysis, synthesis, problem solving, and evaluation. 

 

Core Skills

Core thinking skills are cognitive operations or processes that are the building blocks of thinking.  There are several core thinking skills including focusing, organizing, analyzing, evaluating, and generating. 

Focusing – attending to selected pieces of information while ignoring other stimuli.

Remembering – storing and then retrieving information.

Gathering – bringing to the conscious mind the relative information needed for cognitive processing.

Sorting – identifying traits and similarities to categorize items.

Organizing – arranging information so it can be used more effectively.

Analyzing – breaking down information by examining parts and relationships so that its organizational structure may be understood.

Connecting – making connections between related items or pieces of information. 

Integrating – connecting and combining information to better understand the relationship between the information.

Compiling – putting parts together to form a whole or building a structure or pattern from diverse elements.

Evaluating – assessing the reasonableness and quality of ideas or materials on order to present and defend opinions.

Generating – producing new information, ideas, products, or ways of viewing things.