Assessment Techniques and Students’ Higher-Order Thinking Skills

Improving students’ higher-order thinking skills is a collective experience; one teacher of a specific subject cannot alone improve the higher-order thinking skills, and it is a collaborative process between all subjects’ teachers and can be taught for all levels of studying (Lawson, 1993; Shellens, & Valcke, 2005). Moreover, Benjamin (2008) argues that these skills can be developed in a cumulative fashion as students’ progress through their courses and subjects and other experiences they get from their institutions. As well, by including their subjects by problem solving, critical thinking and decision making activities will help students enhance their higher-order thinking skills. In this paper a mathematics test in fractions was constructed and analyzed for both grades 8 and 9 to make sure how teacher-made tests are constructed and how much of them agreed with the Bloom’s Taxonomy levels. The test consists of five sections or content areas the test was analyzed according to the behavior matrix. The results showed that all test items measure the lower three levels in Bloom’s taxonomy which agrees with Stiggins, R. J., Griswold, M. M., and Wikelund, K. R. (1989) results that most of teacher-made tests measure the lower levels in Bloom’s taxonomy. Moreover, 57.14% of the test items are applications and 28.57% are recognition items. These numbers are consistent with Boyd (2008) study, which indicated that the majority of teachers’ assessment items focused on the lower levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy. Moreover, Boyd concluded that 87% of the teachers’ items that have participated in this study used level 1 of the taxonomy in 20032004, and this percentage increased to 86% in 2005-2006. These numbers reflect the tendency of the assessment methods used in schools to ask students to recall information or to do routine question, which will not help students in improving their higher-order thinking skills.