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put us within reach of a comprehensive framework for making sense of the interconnectedness of social, self, and academic development’.

The widely held view that constructivist beliefs about thinking and learning are incompatible with teacher-directed or behavioural approaches to instruction is an exaggerated position which has only a modest level of support from the meta-analytic findings which favour self-regulation over teacher direction. The fact is that teacher-directed approaches can also be effective in teaching thinking. Strand, BarnesHolmes and Barnes-Holmes (2003) refer to several examples of this within the behaviourist paradigm. Hattie (2002) has compiled convincing evidence to show that ‘direct instruction’ can be highly effective and that pupils learn best when teachers provide high levels of appropriate feedback. As Ausubel argued, meaningful learning often requires a considerable amount of direction by teachers.

Constructing an integrated framework

As we have seen, there have been several attempts to produce an integrated framework for understanding thinking and learning. Those we called ‘all-embracing’ have variously taken into account cognitive, affective and conative aspects of thinking. Whether explicitly or implicitly, they also include metacognition as an important feature. However, while some authors associate metacognition only with thinking processes and skills at the ‘higher’ end of the cognitive domain, we believe that it makes more sense to consider all kinds of thinking, feeling and trying as potentially open to self-awareness and self-regulation. We decided to build our own integrated framework to reflect these ideas. We identified a set of core features and used them to develop a structurally simple framework suitable for a range of applications and formulated in clear and simple English.

All of the all-embracing frameworks in Chapter 6 have certain structural features in common and share all or some of these with every other framework, especially with those directed at instructional design. Bloom’s taxonomy of educational objectives for the cognitive domain (1956) has clearly influenced many other formulations, and this gave us a starting point.

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Bloom’s taxonomy is basically a three-tier model, which we can describe in the following way. Thinking starts with and ends with knowledge, whether in the form of facts, concepts, rules or skills. An essential part of thinking is information-gathering, whether from memory or through perception. Basic thinking (which we call building understanding) consists of relatively simple ways of understanding, elaborating and using what is known. Higher-order thinking (or what we prefer to call productive thinking) is essentially a learning process which leads to a deeper understanding of the nature, justification, implications, and value of what is known.

All the frameworks we have evaluated include classifications of productive thinking. This may involve planning what to do and say, imagining situations, reasoning, solving problems, considering opinions, making decisions and judgments, generating new perspectives and designing and making valued products. Both critical and creative thinking are subsumed by the more general term ‘productive thinking’. Productive thinking is very often supported by dispositions or habits of mind which take time to develop. Like other kinds of thinking, productive thinking may become so well practised as to be taken for granted, but when energised by feelings and determination, it can be, in Lipman’s terms (1995), critical, creative and caring.

Although the Bloom-based model of information-gathering, building understanding and productive thinking is useful, we found it necessary to add another component. In seeking to identify what makes for good thinking and what facilitates meaningful learning, many theorists draw attention to conscious engagement and reflection as well as to relevant abilities and dispositions. We use the accessible and relatively uncontentious terms strategic and reflective thinking to capture these elements. In this way, we arrived at an integrated model and have found that it works well as a way of classifying the broad categories of thinking represented in the frameworks described and evaluated in this book.

Our model (see Figure 7.1) is made up of the three cognitive components which we identified in Bloom’s taxonomy (1956) plus a self-regulatory/metacognitive system. This represents executive functioning as well as what Demetriou calls ‘long-term hypercognition’ (forms of knowledge about oneself as an agent and member of society, such as knowledge of personal qualities, values, roles and strategies).

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Fig. 7.1. An integrated model for understanding thinking and learning.

This model is not restricted to the cognitive domain and is intended to accommodate Lipman’s critical, creative and caring thinking (1995). The terms ‘engagement’ and ‘value-grounded’ are meant to convey our interest in the conative and affective aspects of thinking. We see our model as applying to all kinds of thinking, including the ‘emotional intelligence’ areas which Gardner (1983; 1993) describes as interpersonal and intrapersonal intelligence. Although derived from models which are intended to represent an individual’s thinking, our integrated model is just as applicable to the thinking of groups and organisations.

There is an essential difference between cognitive skills and strategic and reflective thinking in terms of the nature and quality of experience involved. Cognitive skills are procedures which can become automatised and are not necessarily associated with effort or emotion. However, strategic and reflective thinking are always highly conscious and are often experienced as involving will and/or emotion as well as cognition.

Strategic and reflective thinking are not easy, since they require sustained concentration, not only on the matter in hand, but also on how a task is conceived and whether or not there should be a change of strategy in the light of new and previous experience. Strategic and reflective thinking may involve considering the meaning of an activity in holistic as well as analytic ways. This kind of thinking is important

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when embarking on activities which make considerable demands on a person, such as an academic or vocational course or project. It can also be extremely valuable in dealing with much smaller issues, for example when there is a challenge to an assumption, belief or a communication problem. Most significantly, it is what changes what could be a routine process into a learning experience. The development of strategic and reflective thinking is acknowledged to be a major goal of higher education. We see it as equally important in lifelong learning at all ages and stages.

The two-way arrows between strategic and reflective thinking and cognitive skills in figure 7.1 do not fully represent the possible relationships between them. In many thinking and learning situations there certainly is two-way interaction. However, this does not always apply, since cognitive skills can be exercised effectively in unplanned and unreflective ways: for example, young children thinking creatively and developing productive problem-solving strategies, but being unable to give an account of the process (Alexander et al., 2004). On the other hand, it is impossible to operate at the level of strategic, value-grounded thinking without information-gathering and other cognitive skills coming into play. It is important to note that we are not making any claims about how thinking starts or about causality. The impetus for strategic or reflective thought may be situationally specific, as when a particular problem causes cognitive conflict, or it may flow from a well-established disposition or ‘habit of mind’. What we do claim is that when thinking is strategic and reflective (involving the exercise of conscious purpose and a carefully executed plan), meaningful learning – to use Ausubel’s phrase (1968) – is more likely to occur.

In the cognitive skill part of the framework, the three components (information-gathering, building understanding and productive thinking) are ordered from left to right, but this is not meant to imply that all thinking processes include the middle level of building understanding, as it is possible to go straight from information-gathering to productive thinking. Information-gathering is a prerequisite for either building understanding or productive thinking, but it is not necessarily a simpler or less conscious process. Although it very often happens that thinking develops through distinguishable (if overlapping) phases,

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from information-gathering to building understanding to a sound judgment or deeper understanding, this is not always the case, since these phases can take place in parallel or in complex systems with movement in both directions (as when it is found at a late stage of problem-solving that a vital piece of information is missing). The dotted lines in the diagram show that the boundaries between phases are far from rigid, since in the process of thinking, information can transmute into understanding and understanding into information.

The integrated framework proposed here is in some respects similar to the map of the thinking domain created by Swartz and Parks (1994). However, Swartz and Parks do not deal with information-gathering and use rather more categories to cover what we have called building understanding and productive thinking. Although they constantly stress the importance of metacognition, Swartz and Parks do not represent it on their map. Our integrated framework is not only simple in structure, but is compatible with the categories teachers are encouraged to use (such as in the National Curriculum for England or Scottish Curriculum Guidelines) as well as with leading theories about thinking and learning. The motivational and regulatory aspects of thinking (which cognitive psychologists think of as functions involving the ‘central executive’) are distinguished from cognitive skills; but, unlike Marzano, we do not see the need to distinguish between a self system and metacognitive system, since conscious planning, monitoring and evaluating functions are not neatly separable into two components, as presented in Marzano’s model. This is recognised by Pintrich (2000), who includes Marzano’s self-system and metacognitive-system functions within a unified framework of self-regulated learning.

We believe that the two-level structure of our model is a more accurate representation of how people think than a multilevel hierarchy. It also easily accommodates the various ways in which young and novice learners think strategically and reflectively as they develop information-gathering skills and build understanding. Without such a framework it is difficult for teachers to identify how comprehensive a particular curriculum is or, for example, to evaluate the claims of a thinking skills programme in covering aspects of critical thinking. We believe that our simple framework has potential as a tool for use in planning and evaluating courses and curricula, and constructing and