• Instruct students to answer the following problem: John had forty-five apples. While driving home, twelve rolled out of his truck. He stopped, and his neighbor doubled the apples he had. How many apples does John have now?
• Instruct students to create a grocery list of items they need to make spaghetti for their family. Students should use local grocery advertisements to help them stay within a given budget.
• Instruct students to use a six-step prewriting process to plan a letter to their principal about their thoughts on changes to the student cell phone policy.
• Instruct students to use the SOAPSTone (speaker, occasion, audience, purpose, subject, tone) process to identify each element in a two-paragraph newspaper editorial.
Thinking at the Analyze Level
At the Analyze level, learners use knowledge and understanding to complete higher-level tasks. If a student can search the internet for the correct answer or provide the teacher with an answer within a few minutes, the task is not at this level. This level is also the ground floor for the even higher-level thinking that goes on at the Evaluate and Create levels. “A key component of critical thinking is the process of analyzing and assessing thinking with a view to improving it. Hence, many consider the Analyze level as the beginning of deep-thinking processes” (Stobaugh, 2013, p. 28).
At the Analyze level, there are three cognitive processes: (1) differentiating, (2) organizing, and (3) attributing.
Differentiating
With this cognitive process, students must determine relevant and irrelevant source information. Differentiating is more complex than the Understand-level cognitive process of comparing since students must determine which information contributes to an overall structure. The following are examples of activities that use the differentiating cognitive process.
• Instruct students to determine which facts from a source you provide do not match characteristics of a given landform.
• Instruct students to highlight information from a relevant source that is not needed to solve a real-world problem.
• Instruct students to identify evidence in a related text supporting the claim that global warming is occurring.
• Instruct students to identify quotes from a story-based text that establish and support the theme.
Organizing
When organizing, students examine interactions and sequences of events to identify connections among relevant information. They must then design a new arrangement or structure for the information that depicts these relationships. To demonstrate their knowledge, students might construct charts, diagrams, outlines, flowcharts, or other graphic organizers to depict the interrelationships among the information. The following are examples of activities that use the organizing cognitive process.
• Instruct students to select a graph format that most appropriately organizes given data.
• After having students examine five real-world mathematical prompts, have them sort the prompts into two groups and explain how they are similar.
• Instruct students to categorize the twenty vocabulary words in three to five groups and explain what the words in each group have in common.
• Instruct students to create a graphic organizer or another visual depicting the claims and counterclaims for an argument.
Attributing
The cognitive process of attributing involves students identifying biases, assumptions, or points of view in information. Assessing the credibility of sources helps students analyze that information. The following are examples of activities that use the attributing cognitive process.
• Instruct students to read a primary source on a word-processing program and add a comment to the text when they see it express biases, assumptions, or points of view.
• Instruct students to examine the data related to students’ perspectives on school lunches, and have them use the information available to determine what concerns this information reveals and if those perspectives are rooted in real or perceived issues.
• After reading the novel The Awakening (Chopin, 1993), instruct students to determine the author’s perspective of gender roles. Students explain the perspective using at least five quotes from the text.
• Instruct students to determine the author’s point of view in an article about gun violence. Students should cite textual evidence to support their conclusion.
• After reviewing the beginning steps of a peer’s science experiment, instruct students to identify any biases or assumptions its creator made in his or her hypothesis.
Thinking at the Evaluate Level
To prepare students to survive and succeed in the modern world, evaluating information is a vital skill. As educator and leadership expert Douglas Reeves (2015) states, “Reluctance to criticize and evaluate is the ally of mediocrity” (p. 25).
At the Evaluate level, students examine information sources to assess quality and then make decisions based on specific criteria. When students engage in Evaluate-level tasks, they typically also deploy lower-level skills, particularly at the Analyze level. This makes evaluating a highly engaging cognitive process.
There are two cognitive processes at the Evaluate level: (1) checking and (2) critiquing.
Checking
Checking encompasses examining for fallacies or inconsistencies (Anderson & Krathwohl, 2001). In Assessing Critical Thinking in Middle and High Schools, I write, “Students possessing this cognitive ability pursue unsubstantiated claims, question ideas, and demand validation for arguments, interpretations, assumptions, beliefs, or theories” (Stobaugh, 2013, p. 33). To check a source, students might examine the author’s qualifications, determine if it provides sufficient and valid evidence for its perspective, or assess if it uses reliable sources. The following are examples of activities that use the checking cognitive process.
• Instruct students to watch a peer group’s ShowMe (www.showme.com) screencast recording that details the group’s problem-solving steps as it attempts to solve a multistep, real-world mathematics problem. Students check their work and identify any errors.
• Instruct students to examine the inferences of a peer’s analysis of an earthquake magnitude per region chart. Students determine if each inference is accurate based on the data and explain why.
• Instruct students to examine a peer’s essay that provides evidence his or her fictional animal can survive in a particular habitat. Students determine whether the peer used sufficient and valid substantiation to support the survival of his or her new creation.
• Instruct students to read a political speech, and determine if its arguments are logical or fallacies.
• Instruct students to read “A Modest Proposal” by essayist Jonathan Swift (1996) and identify logical arguments and fallacies he makes in the text.
Critiquing
Critiquing involves using set criteria to evaluate various options. When critiquing, students identify reasons each option meets or does not meet the criteria, ultimately identifying the best choice. The following are examples of activities that use the critiquing cognitive process.
• Instruct students to use their knowledge about money and counting money to determine if Alexander, in Alexander, Who Used to Be Rich Last Sunday (Viorst, 1987), is making the best decisions. Students describe three choices Alexander makes during the story and use their mathematics skills to explain if those are good