Content Thinking Skills

In addition to knowing how to learn, a student's performance in any subject area is heavily influenced by what he or she already knows about that subject. Content thinking skills are those strategies that facilitate a student's understanding of specific subject area material. These skills can be subdivided into declarative (factual) and procedural knowledge.

 

Declarative knowledge refers to information about basic concepts and large organizational patterns of information. Initially, a child's declarative knowledge consists a set of images with some linguistic description of the content. After repeated exposure to the concept, the child develops a linguistic description of the concept, which approximates a formal definition.

 

Procedural knowledge refers to knowing a process and when to use it. According to Anderson (1982), this knowledge develops in three stages: (1) the cognitive stage, at which the child can verbalize a process and perform a crude approximation of it, (2) the associative stage, at which errors are detected and the procedure is gradually "smoothed out," and (3) the autonomous stage, at which the procedure is refined and eventually reaches a level of automaticity where it requires little thought or energy for execution.

The term prior knowledge is often employed to refer to content thinking skills that are prerequisites or would influence a particular unit of instruction. A child's content knowledge regarding simple division, addition, subtraction, and multiplication would be prior knowledge relevant to a unit on long division.

Your understanding of Information Processing from Chapter 6 of this book - plus whatever else you know or think you know about thinking skills - is your prior knowledge regarding the present chapter.

 

Chapter 4 of this book discussed prior knowledge as the existing structures in long-term memory which enable learners to assimilate new information and to make cognitive adjustments. Chapter 3 discussed the activation of prior knowledge as the key step leading up to the selective perception of appropriate information for any type of thinking. Prior knowledge often supports productive thinking; but misconceptions (discussed in Chapters 4 and 6) are forms of prior knowledge that interfere with learning.

Content thinking skills are learned within specific subject areas, and they are generally applicable only to the areas in which they are learned. However, by using analogies or other strategies to enhance generalization, content thinking skills can become useful in other subject areas as well.

The present chapter discusses strategies for teaching all thinking skills except content thinking skills. That's because content thinking skills are usually taught by moving through the phases of learning and instruction, which have already been discussed in detail in chapter 3 of this book.

Click on a topic from the following list, or use your web browser to go where you want to go:

• Introduction
• Learning-to-Learn Skills
• Content Thinking Skills <<You are here>>
• Basic Reasoning Skills
• Summary of Thinking Skills
• Metacognitive Skills
• Development of Thinking Skills
• Cognitive Skills Instruction
• Self-Regulation of Learning
• Notetaking
• Stimulating Creative Thinking
• Stimulating Critical Thinking
• What Teachers and Parents Can Do to Simulate Thinking Skills
• What Students Can Do to Simulate Thinking Skills
• Summary
• Annotated Bibliography