HOTS Curriculum

Pogrow (1987) describes the HOTS curriculum:

"The HOTS program currently consists of daily lessons built around popular, commercially available software that develops the following thinking skills:

• Metacognition: Developing and articulating strategies and testing their effects in solving problems. Such articulation both requires and develops sophisticated language comprehension skills.

• Inference: Building understanding of unknown concepts by using information from known concepts. Again, language skills help make the necessary connections.

• Decontextualization: Generalizing information from one context to another. When poor learners encounter a new bit of information, it is stored in memory as a concept peculiar to the specific context in which it was learned. Problem solving requires an ability to link related ideas.

• Combining and synthesizing information.

The HOTS curriculum differs substantially from conventional approaches to using computers. Software is not used to teach the above or any other specific skills. Rather, software is used as a opportunity to create 'learning dramas': situations where students are highly motivated to complete a task and where questions are developed to stimulate students to engage in the key thinking skills. These questions are not necessarily related to the specific goal of the software, nor is the specific goal of the software important to the learning process. The programs simply involve and intrigue the students.

The following is an example of a questioning strategy developed around the popular Oregon Trail simulation to promote the key thinking skills:

• For metacognition skills, ask, 'What strategy did you use to get to Oregon, and why was it more successful than other attempts?' or 'What strategy did you use and why was it unsuccessful?'

• To facilitate decontextualization, ask, 'Where have you heard the word yoke before?' or 'From what perspective are you viewing the wagon, and how did that differ from the perspective when you were flying the balloon in the Ride the Wind program?'

• To emphasize inference from context, give these directions: 'Read the instructions and tell me if you think a yoke as used in this program is part of an egg [the yolk], why not, what you think it might be, and why you think it would be important.'

• And finally, to encourage students to combine the information they've learned, ask, 'Is anyone who traveled the Oregon Trail still alive today? How could you figure it out?' " (p. 11)

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