Discerning student thinking: a practical theoretical framework for recognising or informally assessing different ways of thinking

ABSTRACT

We expect our students to learn different ways of thinking, such as historical empathy or scientific reasoning, reflection, critical analysis, or clinical reasoning. But how do we discern if they have learned these ways of thinking when thinking is often abstract, tacit and seemingly invisible? In this conceptual and theoretical article, I argue that we can discern any kind of thinking, however we define it, if we focus on the observable actions or thinking behaviours associated with that thinking. Based on this argument, I then offer a theoretical framework for teachers so they might recognise and informally assess the particular kind of student thinking they want to cultivate. This framework synthesises several important theories about how we learn to think, and distinguishes six general features a teacher might look for to be more discerning about any kind of thinking: visibility, complexity, frequency, flexibility, independence, and application of the thinking behaviours.

KEYWORDS:

• Assessing thinking
• critical thinking
• reflective thinking
• metacognition
• clinical reasoning
• visible thinking

Acknowledgements

Thank you to Jeffrey Smith for discussion about a draft of this article, and for Hazel Tucker, Megan Anakin and Stephen Cranefield, who were the source of some illustrative examples.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.