Higher-order Capabilities: Why Are They Important?
Higher-order capabilities are learned through the learning processes that a person goes through, since the human being, from birth, and through language and communication with others and with the environment, is learning continuously.
Learning takes place in a social and cultural context, and it is an individual activity to acquire knowledge through study, exercise or experience.
What does it mean to learn?
As we have said, learning is acquiring knowledge, but this does not only mean memorizing it, it also means understanding and valuing it. For which, other cognitive operations are necessary, such as the capacity for analysis and the capacity for synthesis.
Thus, these cognitive operations will allow people to assimilate information about concepts, procedures and values. But that, in addition, with that information, they build new functional mental representations to apply in different contexts and circumstances.
Learning, then, is a skill that allows people to develop others, know and acquire habits, build and modify attitudes and behaviors. In short, human learning allows the development of the necessary capacities to adapt motoristically and intellectually to the environment.
Higher-order intellectual capacities
Within the skills or capacities to be developed by people through learning processes, there are more complex ones known or called ‘higher order capacities’.
Mathew Lipman, in his book Complex Thinking and Education, talks about building better quality thinking that develops higher psychological functions. The author refers to a way of reasoning more similar to that necessary in an investigation, which is constantly questioning himself.
Thus, Lipman argues that capacities that are of a higher order must be developed, and defines them as “ The set of internalized, organized, and coordinated actions that promote adequate information processing, focused both on the information to be processed in itself , as well as the structures, processes and strategies that are being used to process it ”.
The higher-order capabilities are as follows:
- Analysis. C apacity to distinguish and separate the parts of a whole until disclosing their principles or elements.
- Synthesis. C apacity to arrive at the composition of a whole from the knowledge and reunion of its parts.
- Conceptualization. It is the ability to abstract the features that are necessary and sufficient to describe a situation, a phenomenon or a problem.
- Information management. Ability to visualize the constitutive elements of a situation as a system. That is, as a set of rules, principles or measures that are related to each other.
- Critical thinking. Ability to think on their own, analyzing and evaluating the consistency of their own ideas, both what is read, what is heard, what is observed.
- Investigation. It is the ability to propose precise hypotheses of what is studied. In addition, it involves collecting data and information for the purpose of verifying hypotheses and subsequently formulating laws and theories.
- Metacognition. It is the ability to reflect on your own thoughts.
The Importance of Higher-Order Capabilities for Higher-Order Thinking
At the base of higher-order thinking lies a development and management of the higher-order intellectual capacities that we have mentioned.
Although higher-order thinking is possible in maturity, it is important that the capacities that allow it are developed and strengthened from an early age. And this can be done both in family and school contexts, and in other formal and informal education settings.
Ultimately, higher-order capabilities are important for structuring complex thinking capable of attending to both content and procedures. And they are important because they enable rational and reflective thinking that is critical, innovative and creative at the same time.
