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Find more Kappan articles in the Subscribe today to access complete current issues online! HOTS Revisited: A Thinking Development Approach Mr. Pogrow, creator of HOTS, updates readers on the past 10 years' worth of research on the program's effectiveness. The findings, he believes, make clear not only what conditions are necessary for this unique intervention to succeed but also why other reforms have not significantly reduced the achievement gap. THE PASSAGE of Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act in 1965 marked the beginning of a federal commitment to provide supplementary help in basic skills directly to disadvantaged students. The funds were used to reteach the concepts that the students had not learned the first time and to continue to reteach them, in essentially the same way, until the money ran out. As simplistic as the idea was, this targeted help reduced the achievement gap substantially between 1965 and 1988. However, a large gap still remained in 1988, the amount of reduction seemed to be leveling off, and the benefits seen in the early grades did not appear to carry over very substantially into the later grades. As a result, Title I policy switched course after 1988 to use the funds to improve the school as a whole. It was believed that an improving school would disproportionately benefit its disadvantaged students. In addition, the focus was on using (supposedly) research-validated, one-size-fits-all comprehensive reform models. So what happened? After 1988, the achievement gap began to widen again, so that by 1999 the white/black gap in reading for fourth-graders had reverted to what it had been in 1975, and the gap was only slightly smaller between white and Latino students. This reversal of progress meant that by 2003 approximately half of the minority students in the eighth grade were reading below basic levels, and only about 13% were proficient in reading.1 Running counter to these dismal trends were the findings from the HOTS (Higher Order Thinking Skills) program. Fifteen years ago, an article about HOTS appeared in this journal.2 This article updates the findings published then. Description of the HOTS Program The HOTS program was started 25 years ago in the belief that educationally disadvantaged students (Title I and learning disabled) were bright and that the top priority for supplemental aid for these students should be to help them channel that innate intelligence into learning at a higher level. The students were treated as intellectually "gifted." The goals of the intervention were to increase thinking and socialization skills in ways that simultaneously increased test scores and overall academic performance -- all without extra drill or teaching to the test. HOTS was also designed to work in the years after grade 3, when progress from earlier interventions dissipates, gaps rewiden, and disadvantaged students fall increasingly farther behind. The program was eventually adopted on a large scale, in approximately 2,600 schools, serving approximately half a million disadvantaged students. The approach HOTS took from the beginning was to generate a very creative and intensive conversational environment. This approach was taken because the amount of conversation at home varies dramatically with economic status. A study of home discussion patterns among attentive parents found that working-class parents made half as many statements to their young children per hour as professional-level parents and that welfare parents made half as many statements to their young children as working-class parents. Reduced levels of home conversation not only resulted in more limited vocabularies for low-income students when they entered school, but also stunted their ability to process ideas. We find that this cognitive inhibition primarily shows up as a limiting factor for low-income students after third grade, when the curriculum becomes more integrative -- regardless of how well the students have done earlier. This research also showed that children exposed to higher levels of parental conversation did better on a measure of developmental I.Q. at age 3 and that these differences remained at age 9.3 The rich conversational environment of HOTS combines the use of technology with Socratic teaching techniques, i.e., teaching by questioning rather than by telling. Computers are used to heighten student interest and to allow students to test the consequences of their ideas, but computers are not used to directly teach anything. The primary instructional characteristic of the HOTS approach is to shift the nature of talk that goes on during instruction in the typical classroom with disadvantaged students. Instead of lots of teacher talk and a few words spoken by a few students, HOTS provides an environment in which there is little teacher talk and direction and lots of student talk. In essence, HOTS provides the dinner table conversation that the students do not have in their homes. At the same time, not all conversation can stimulate powerful forms of student learning. The student talk and teachers' questions need to be highly systematic, creative, and intensive. The HOTS process of Socratic teaching and conversation is driven by a sophisticated and creative curriculum designed in accordance with theories of brain development. In addition, teachers receive intensive training to develop new reflexes for listening to and analyzing student answers and for inventing appropriate follow-up probes. The teachers learn to guide students without simplifying problems, reducing ambiguity, or telling students what to do. The goal is for students to construct ideas and strategies on their own -- and to verbalize their thoughts. The HOTS curriculum is designed so that the conversations lead students into the following key cognitive processes that underlie all learning: 1) metacognition, i.e., the ability to think about, develop, and articulate problem-solving strategies; 2) inference from context; 3) decontextualization, i.e., generalizing ideas and information from one context to another; and 4) information synthesis. The curriculum develops students' ability to generalize by having them discuss the use of 16 linkage concepts. One HOTS teacher reported that she asked her Title I students who had been in the program for two years: What is similar about a hamburger and a roller coaster? As a result of constantly discovering and applying these linkages, the students came up with 97 answers judged to be correct. The four key thinking processes cannot be formally taught. Rather, they are developed by a cultural process in which students repeatedly encounter interesting situations that require the use of these cognitive skills to resolve problems. The accumulation of enough of these experiences induces students to internalize the skills that underlie all learning, and the students spontaneously incorporate them into everyday life and learning. As I mentioned above, the role of the computer in HOTS is not to teach, present content, or even serve as a tool. Rather, computer simulations provide a shared setting within which students discuss ideas for solving problems and interpreting the events and language they encounter. This mirrors how talk around the dinner table makes use of life experiences as a shared basis for family conversation. Using the computer in this way creates what is called a "learning drama." The learning about thinking comes from the discussion rather than from the successful use of the software. The learning drama approach made it possible for HOTS to incorporate problem-solving tasks that are extremely difficult. Indeed, they are so difficult that the students invariably fail at them initially. However, because of the captivating nature of the tasks, rather than give up, the students persevere and eventually develop a successful strategy for figuring things out. Once students have gone through this "controlled floundering" process, in which initial failure is converted by their thinking into ultimate success, they come to expect success and are not deterred by initial difficulties. The differentiated approach of HOTS in lieu of supplemental drill and test prep was a major strategic shift in how to help the disadvantaged, and 25 years later -- in the era of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) -- it still is. Piling on lots of extra drill and test prep did not work when HOTS was developed, and it will not work now. Yet, once again, schools are reflexively reacting to accountability pressure by increasing drill and test prep. Only this time, the situation is much worse, with some schools focusing on reading skills for as much as three hours a day. HOTS Outcomes So much for a brief background sketch of HOTS. What evidence is there that it works? Test score gains. In a series of evaluations, some conducted by me and some done independently by school districts, HOTS students' scores generally increased twice as much as those of comparison groups in overall reading and about three times as much in reading comprehension. The students also made substantial growth in math. In some cases, the gains were extraordinary. In my 1990 Kappan article, I reported on a school where Title I students gained 5.6 years in reading in the first year of HOTS and where 20% of the students scored above the high school level. The relative advantage and the large gains found on nationally normed tests have also carried over to state tests and NCLB criteria. For example, research compiled by the Cleveland County (North Carolina) Schools found that schools using HOTS not only exceeded state expected growth targets, but also exceeded exemplary growth targets, while the non-HOTS schools were on average below even the expected growth targets. Transfer. Of course, test score gains alone are highly suspicious. Anyone can produce gains on a specific test by teaching to the test. However, such gains generally do not transfer to other tests and do not represent real literacy development. In the absence of transfer, students have to be retaught every individual thing they are behind in -- an impossibility. In addition, reteaching has little effect after the third grade. What is significant about the HOTS score gains reported in the various evaluations is that the intervention was not geared to any particular test -- or even to specific content skills. The gains were similar across a wide variety of tests since the program did not mandate specific tests and schools continued to use whatever tests they were already using. Thus the HOTS gains appear to reflect real gains in literacy. In addition, schools reported gains on both reading and math assessments, and, when more than one test was used, the students generally made gains on each of them. For example, Estelle Elementary in the Jefferson Parish (Louisiana) School District found that scores in the HOTS grades went up substantially not only on the Louisiana Educational Assessment Program (LEAP) test but also on the norm-referenced Iowa Tests of Basic Skills in reading and math. The best evidence that the intervention produced more than just test score gains came from dissertation research conducted by Mary Ann Darmer, who also happened to be a HOTS teacher in a very high-poverty school.4 In her research, Darmer went beyond conventional test scores and measured student growth on 21 other outcomes as well. These included metacognition, writing, components of I.Q., transfer to novel problem-solving tasks, and grade-point average. In addition, the HOTS and comparison students both had the same classroom teacher, a rare occurrence in comparative research. The comparison students remained in the classroom to get extra content help. This increased the likelihood that any observed differences were the result of the program. So which students do you think did better? The ones who received extra content help under the direction of the classroom teacher? Or those who worked with a HOTS specialist on developing their general thinking skills without linkage to classroom content? It wasn't even close. The HOTS students did much better across the board. While HOTS students' abilities increased substantially in all 22 pre/post comparisons, the comparison students made no gains in the fourth grade and declined in the fifth. HOTS students substantially outperformed the comparison Title I students in all comparisons between the groups. For example, the average GPA for HOTS students went up a whole letter grade, while comparison students made no progress. This is an amazing result since HOTS had nothing to do with classroom content or grading practices. Thirty-five percent of the HOTS students made the honor roll at the end of the first year, and 44% entered the science contest. In addition, HOTS students made more than four times the growth in reading comprehension, and the divergence was even greater in the fifth grade, when the comparison students actually declined. In other words, HOTS students achieved substantially higher levels of content knowledge and skills with less content instruction because they could learn more efficiently and could automatically generalize and apply what they learned. Most important, a follow-up study showed that the benefits from HOTS were retained in later years. The data collected by Darmer in the follow-up study of the students who had been in HOTS for two years in grades 4 and 5 show that dramatic differences remained between them and the control group students. Of the 28 students in HOTS, 20 had middle school records in the district, while only seven of the original 24 control students were still in the district's middle schools.5 By the end of the eighth grade, HOTS students had an average GPA half a letter grade higher than the remaining comparison students. Half the HOTS students had an average eighth-grade GPA of A-. Only four of the HOTS students had been retained a grade or a semester as of the end of middle school.6 By high school, 16 of the 28 students who had been in HOTS for two years were still enrolled in the district's high schools, while just three of the 24 control students were still enrolled. From such follow-ups, it appears that the test-score gains of HOTS students result from the transfer of improved thinking skills into overall literacy and academic and cognitive growth. The power of transfer is so great that the indirect HOTS approach improves test scores (and other valuable outcomes) to a far greater degree than extra help in subject matter and test taking; HOTS enables students to learn and apply content and skills the first time they are taught. The importance of transfer. The transfer produced by HOTS is in direct contrast to the outcomes of test-prep reforms that focus on extra drill. The Chancellor's schools in New York City spent three hours a day on reading. Reading scores did go up, but math scores were no better than those in comparison schools, and there was only enough time remaining in the school schedule to teach science or social studies once a week. Thus the scores in those subjects will presumably go down. In other words, the increase in reading scores did not transfer to other subjects. It appears that increasing scores in those other subjects would require teaching each of them for three hours a day and keeping kids in school till midnight. When Texas 10th-graders who passed the TASS test of basic skills were given another test, the Stanford 9, they scored at the fifth percentile.7 In other words, passing the TASS did not transfer, and the students were essentially illiterate on other literacy tasks. They were certainly not ready for higher education. The goal of standards and improvement must be to raise scores in ways that transfer to other tasks. Producing Transfer: HOTS Research Findings HOTS appears to be the first program for developing thinking skills to produce substantial and consistent test score gains on a large scale with at-risk students after the third grade. Moreover, it does so in ways that transfer to other types of learning. Why did HOTS succeed where so many other efforts have failed? To refine the innovative curriculum and teacher training methods, thousands of hours were spent observing student/teacher conversations, learning from success, and adjusting the implementation and design when problems arose. After about 10 years of such design experience, clear patterns began to emerge with regard to the conditions needed for the HOTS approach to be effective. At that point, an effort was made to understand why it was working under those particular conditions. In trying to understand why the program worked, the powerful learning environment it produced provided a unique tool with which to research students' cognitive capabilities and needs. The resultant new knowledge (outlined below) explains not only why HOTS was successful but also why both traditional and progressive reforms have not historically reduced the learning gap substantially. 1. Most disadvantaged students (Title I and learning disabled) have normal to high levels of intellectual ability and have the ability to perform academically at high levels. Whenever we experimented with tasks that we were sure were far too difficult, the students always succeeded. After 25 years of designing curriculum, I am still not sure how high the ceiling is for what our students can accomplish. I only know that, with the right approach, they always succeeded however difficult the task was. 2. The key learning problems of disadvantaged students are very different in grades K-3 than they are in grades 4-8, and so they require totally different approaches. The biggest learning problems in terms of students' doing well in grades K-3 are that they are missing many fundamental pieces of basic content (e.g., letters, numbers) and do not know how to interact socially in school. The biggest learning problem after grade 3 is that students do not understand "understanding." The absence of a sense of understanding manifests itself in the classroom in students' blank stares when they are asked open-ended "thought" questions. The students seem incapable of handling more than one concept at a time, of having a conversation about ideas, or of thinking ideas through. They view each piece of information as a discrete entity that applies only in the context in which they learned it. They do not seem to understand how to generalize or even that they are supposed to do so. Often these behaviors are understandably seen as evidence of immaturity, a bad attitude, or plain thickheadedness. In reality, the students are very "bright," and the staring and avoidance behaviors reflect something else, something that is cognitive in nature. What is happening is that, in the absence of a sense of understanding, disadvantaged students hit a "cognitive wall."8 Much as a long-distance runner hits a wall -- a point beyond which it is impossible for the body and mind to continue to drive forward -- most Title I students and those with learning disabilities appear to hit the cognitive wall. Shortly after the third grade, these students have extreme difficulty understanding the more complicated learning processes demanded of them, even though they have the intellectual capacity to excel. 3. Until a sense of understanding is developed, the cognitive wall prevents the majority of disadvantaged students in grades 4-8 from succeeding in learning from high-quality content instruction or from thinking-in-content approaches. Nor are they able to transfer skills they have learned, so they do not benefit substantially from additional drill and test prep, and the achievement gap widens. The primary problem in trying to narrow the gap is not so much that schools do not offer high-quality instruction to disadvantaged students, though that is a problem; rather, it is that the students are not prepared to take advantage of high-quality instruction when it is provided because they lack a sense of understanding. The cognitive wall limits the benefit that disadvantaged students can derive from high standards, high-quality instruction, and other reform efforts -- no matter how well intentioned or thoroughly implemented. Extra drill and test prep are of little value. The inevitable result of integrating thinking activities into content coursework as the first step in attempting to develop problem-solving skills is that disadvantaged students not only do not learn to think abstractly; they also do not learn the content. It is a double whammy. This is not to say that disadvantaged students cannot succeed in thinking in content. But this approach cannot be the initial means of developing their thinking skills. 4. Until students develop a sense of understanding, staff development has little effect. We labor under the belief that there is some form of staff development that can solve any problem. However, staff development to prepare teachers to provide advanced content to students who are unprepared to benefit because they do not have a sense of understanding cannot work. Pursuing such a strategy represents an inadequate conception of equity. It is of little value to prepare teachers to ask questions of students who are not prepared to answer them. Until a sense of understanding is generated, most staff development in progressive approaches and reforms will fail to translate into success for disadvantaged students after the third grade. 5. Developing a sense of understanding in most disadvantaged students in grades 4-8 requires a differentiated process that takes almost two years of specially designed interactive conversation activities in a small-group setting with a good teacher for 35-40 minutes a day, at least four days a week. A sense of understanding cannot be produced through casual effort, good intentions, occasional thinking experiences, or passive involvement in thinking activities. The large-scale research around the use of the HOTS program, with many systematic variations tried over the years, has shown that it takes 1-1/2 to two years of 35 minutes a day of intense conversation and reflection, in which students consistently verbalize sophisticated ideas, to develop a sense of understanding. The good news is that a sense of understanding can be developed in so little time. Yet the underlying thinking skills cannot be "taught." Rather, a sense of understanding is developed from extensive student experience in verbalizing thoughtful responses to complex questions and obtaining feedback as to how adults process ideas. The process is a cultural one that requires time for students to acquire sufficient verbalizing experiences. It is similar to the process of teaching an infant to talk. The structure of the interactions is what matters, not their specific content. This means, by the way, that the HOTS conversations do not have to be linked to classroom content. In addition, given the huge preexisting conversation gap, the intervention has to be consistent and intensive throughout the 1-1/2- to two-year period. Groups must be small; teachers must constantly ask questions and probe student responses. It is impossible to provide each student the extensive interaction opportunities needed to develop the sense of understanding in the context of a full-sized classroom -- just as it is impossible to have in-depth conversations with 30 guests at a party. It takes quite a bit of time for students to gain confidence and sufficient experience to speak out spontaneously. For example, it takes about four months before students will give a reason for a response without first being asked, and it takes about six months before they will disconfirm a prior answer. The discussions need to consistently require students to make and justify predictions and strategies and to generalize ideas from one situation to another. At first, teachers need to ask questions patiently and probe the tentative responses. Teaching by asking is difficult -- the educational equivalent of heart surgery in medicine. It is very hard for teachers to hold back, wait patiently and quietly for student responses, and refrain from directing the process of making meaning. Complicating matters further, for this process to work, the curriculum must consistently pose problems that students are interested in so that they will exert mental energy. In the absence of such energy, you cannot develop students' thinking skills. It is hard to communicate in print 1) how undeveloped disadvantaged students' initial ability to reflect upon and articulate their ideas and strategies for solving a problem can be, 2) how much patient work is needed to bring out their natural ability to discuss ideas and make generalizations, and 3) how counterintuitive it is for teachers to persevere in patiently questioning, month after month, while the majority of students still do not respond. Yet just as infants benefit from their parents' patiently speaking to them before they know how to talk, so too do HOTS students quickly start to revel in the expression of their ideas once they begin responding to their teachers' patient questioning. It may take a year, but the students go from viewing conversation as a necessary evil that earns them the right to play computer games to valuing their verbal interactions as the best part of the process. They come to view the teacher not as someone pressuring them but as someone who respects them by caring enough to listen to their ideas. Verbalization then increases dramatically in both quantity and quality, and this is the best indicator that the students have developed a sense of understanding. They become poised, highly articulate youngsters who enjoy discussing ideas and developing and testing problem-solving strategies. At the same time, their test scores will rise, and they are now ready to succeed in challenging content curricula. But I can't emphasize too strongly that a sense of understanding develops not from teachers' asking challenging questions but from students' own experience in verbalizing sophisticated responses. 6. While a sense of understanding does not guarantee academic success later on, its absence makes it very difficult for disadvantaged students to succeed. HOTS appears to work as an enabler or a catalyst. That is, it gives students the ability to do well if they so choose, and most do. However, even after developing a sense of understanding, some middle school students become preoccupied with nonacademic issues, either by choice or as a result of family crises. Yet at the same time, even these students believe they can succeed when school again becomes a priority for them. Conversely, students without a sense of understanding generally do poorly later on. 7. The labels Title I and learning disabled (LD) each encompass a variety of overlapping learning needs that require different interventions, and most students receive the wrong help after the third grade. Approximately 80% of Title I students benefit from HOTS. As for the rest, it appears that approximately 10% of Title I students are students who are borderline educationally mentally handicapped (EMH) and about 10% have undiagnosed physiological issues, most often dyslexia. An approach that focuses solely on basic skills after third grade benefits at best the 10% of students who are borderline EMH, while it inhibits the growth of the vast majority, who need help developing a sense of understanding. It is this phenomenon of unmet needs that accounts for much of the failure to accelerate the learning of disadvantaged students after the third grade and so contributes to the growth of the achievement gap. A similar problem of multiple needs occurs with respect to students labeled LD. A survey of teachers using HOTS with LD students showed that the students benefited from the use of HOTS -- as long as they had a verbal I.Q. of 80 or above. In other words, while some students indeed have severe learning disabilities, LD has also become a catch-all category for students who are having trouble learning. For most of the latter students, the chief learning problem is that they do not understand "understanding," while a minority, with verbal I.Q. scores below 80, have very different learning needs. Indeed, there seems to be great similarity between the learning needs of most students labeled Title I and LD.9 This means that under the current designation system, money and interventions are not being directed at the fundamental learning needs of the students. Doing so requires eliminating the labels of Title I and LD and creating categories that differentiate according to students' fundamental learning blockages, e.g., an undeveloped sense of understanding. Significance of the Research Findings Findings from the HOTS experience have revealed how critical developing a sense of understanding is to accelerating the performance of Title I and LD students after grade 3 and to producing transfer. This sense of understanding is so critical to all forms of skill development that trying to reduce the learning gap without addressing this need is like trying to develop medicines for anemia without understanding the role of hemoglobin in the blood. In addition, the phenomenon of students who do not understand "understanding" is widely misunderstood. People do not realize how profound this lack of understanding generally is for at-risk students. For example, when I've asked, audiences generally estimate that it would take between two and five days of daily help for disadvantaged students to understand the difference between guessing and using a systematic strategy to solve a problem. However, in reality it takes between three and four months. The research findings also reveal the differentiated conditions needed to produce a sense of understanding. The good news is that this cognitive capability can be developed practically on a large scale in a reasonable amount of time, and it can produce the substantial amounts and varieties of academic and social growth that are needed to reduce the learning gap. However, the findings also suggest that producing such success is very condition-specific: meet the conditions for developing a sense of understanding outlined in the previous section, and you get growth; fail to meet them, and you don't -- no matter how much money is spent or how much staff development is provided. Historically, reform efforts, both traditional and progressive, have not lived up to expectations. From the HOTS research findings, we can posit that these efforts did not balance basic-skills instruction and thinking development properly, did not sequence thinking development properly, misunderstood specialized point-in-time learning needs, did not provide sophisticated specialized interventions, and did not differentiate supplemental interventions for actual cognitive learning needs and blockages. Ultimately, successful reform is like cooking. You need to start with good ingredients. But two cooks can start with the same ingredients, and one can produce a great dish and the other, something foul. It is all in how you balance and sequence the use of the ingredients. HOTS research provides unprecedented insight into how to identify, develop, and mix the ingredients. Clearly, some of the findings are counterintuitive, one is politically difficult, and all of them require a more sophisticated conception of leadership and practice in order to be implemented. But there is a big payoff. HOTS is uniquely effective because it is used in accordance with these research findings.10 Even HOTS marketing materials delineate the conditions of effectiveness and spell out which students the program should be used with and when. Of course, it would be nice if we had a single approach that worked universally or that could help students develop an understanding of understanding in the first grade.11 At the same time, there is no excuse for not developing a sense of understanding as early as possible after grade 3 or for failing to provide high-quality problem-solving opportunities thereafter. However, old habits die hard, and the reflexive response to NCLB by the overwhelming majority of administrators -- as in past periods that stressed accountability -- is to embrace drill and kill and intensive test prep. Regardless of what one thinks about NCLB, responding in such a way is wrong. Relying on drill and kill and test prep under NCLB has not, and will not, produce substantial gains after grade 3.12 When the best teaching and the most creative curriculum are provided to them, even for just a part of the day, disadvantaged students flourish. This does not require more time in the school day, but rather, a reallocation of time. I will state it again as clearly as possible -- after the third grade, 60 minutes of reading-skill development plus 35 minutes of HOTS produces better test results than 95 minutes of reading-skill development and test prep. In NCLB terms, the former is the better way to accelerate improvement among students in the subgroups and maximize annual progress. Incorporating HOTS The optimized design that emerged from the large-scale research was to provide HOTS as a supplemental program for 35- to 40-minute periods, at least four times a week, for most Title I and LD students in grades 4-8.13 These sessions can be provided during the school day or even after school.14 A teacher can work with as many as 10 students at a time, and a combination of a teacher and a paraprofessional can work with up to 13. There are two modes for using the program. For low- to medium-poverty schools, the disadvantaged students meet with a specially trained HOTS teacher outside the regular class as a separate period either during or after school. For high-poverty schools with a good staff, all the teachers in the targeted grade levels are HOTS trained, and the entire class receives HOTS training. Half the class is taught by the regular classroom/content teacher, and the other half by a HOTS specialist in a common area.15 At the middle school level, HOTS usually fills a separate period in the students' schedule. Ideally, schools and districts would take advantage of the new intellectual capabilities of students who have been through the HOTS program by following through with better content-learning opportunities. Moreover, HOTS can ideally be used as part of a feeder system that can improve the receiving schools. For example, if only one elementary school in a feeder pattern adopts the program, this does not create a critical mass of disadvantaged students in the middle school who are ready for advanced work. Alternatively, if all the underachieving, low-income students in all the feeder elementary schools have taken part in HOTS, this does provide a critical mass of incoming students that would raise the intellectual potential of the receiving middle school. And thus the good curricular initiatives already in place at that school would become more effective. An alternative systemic approach would be for middle schools in a region to provide HOTS to all entering sixth-graders who fit the profile (underachieving disadvantaged students). If all the middle schools in a feeder pattern engaged in this process, the result would be that a critical mass of students ready for advanced work would be present to upgrade the performance of the receiving high school. In either case, once disadvantaged students have been through the HOTS program, they should ideally be placed into at least one high-quality content course with high-performing students. This then completes the two- to three-year cycle needed to transform students from individuals who do not understand "understanding" into successful content learners. Thereafter, a substantial number of these students will be successful in Advanced Placement courses. Of course, high-poverty schools do have substantial student mobility. This factor has made it difficult to get school administrators to plan systematically for the two- to three-year cycle needed to enable students to be successful content learners. This failure of planning is reinforced by the notion that "equity" means doing the same thing for all students -- a notion that usually translates into a lowest-common-denominator approach to instruction for all disadvantaged students. Such an approach precludes adopting even short-term systematic plans for improvement and is one reason that low-income households with strong ties to the community are increasingly disillusioned with the public schools. At the same time, having worked in some areas with the highest levels of poverty in the country, I have never encountered a school without a substantial core of stable students. This core is where you start. For example, one middle school we worked with in San Diego had more than 90% of students qualifying for subsidized lunches and a mobility rate of 180%. This mobility rate was caused by students moving back and forth across the U.S.-Mexico border. However, it turned out that 80% of this high mobility rate was caused by just 20% of the students. In other words, most of the disadvantaged students were stable -- even in that school. The stable students were placed in HOTS. The mobile students were provided with a supplemental computerized drill program -- the best possible supplemental intervention given their circumstances. As a result of this conception of equity -- i.e., differentiating interventions to maximize the benefit for students given their particular circumstances -- this school won the award for the most improved. There is no excuse for not systematically putting in place the two- to three-year cycle needed to develop the full intellectual capabilities of the stable students from low-income households or for not making sure that they receive the needed cycle of sophisticated, differentiated activities. Providing this level of instruction would give inner-city parents concerned about their children's educational opportunities an incentive to stay in their local public schools -- rather than opting for charter schools or simply moving away. As a result, while HOTS will continue to work with individual schools, a primary goal will be to implement and study the use of HOTS as part of an overall, coordinated reform process for at least an entire feeder pattern. When I first started HOTS 25 years ago, individuals would constantly ask whether a thinking approach was legal under Title I regulations. Today, I constantly get asked whether using HOTS is consistent with state standards. Ain't progress great? During this entire period, HOTS accelerated the learning of disadvantaged students after the third grade and produced transfer. Perhaps one of these days that will become unambiguously legal. The knowledge generated from 25 years of HOTS shows that we can control our own destiny, despite the many problems that beset us. This knowledge has stood the test of time, both in terms of producing gains and in predicting why the hot reform of the moment will not work beyond grade 3 (that includes the current approaches being used under NCLB). We can build upon the gains we know how to make in grades K-3 and use this new knowledge to continue to accelerate disadvantaged students after the third grade, thereby narrowing the achievement gap. We have only scratched the surface of what students are capable of and what we are capable of helping them to achieve. By developing a sense of understanding, we can use the power of education to transform underachieving students from passive to eager learners, with eyes shining brightly at the thought of a new learning challenge. This was our dream when we decided to become educators. All we need to do, for only a small part of the school day, is mobilize our resources to provide students with the most powerful educational technology of all -- a good teacher engaging them in sophisticated and interesting conversation. The students will then be able -- and will want -- to take advantage of good teaching and curriculum. And once they do, they will make SYP (Superb Yearly Progress). 1. The corresponding figures for whites were 18% below basic and 39% proficient or advanced. 2. ?Stanley Pogrow,"Challenging At-Risk Students: Findings from the HOTS Program," Phi Delta Kappan, January 1990, pp. 389-97. 3. Bruce Bower, "Talkative Parents Make Kids Smarter," Science News, 17 August 1996, p. 100. This report is based on research by Betty Hart and Todd Risley, both affiliated with the University of Kansas. For a description of their actual research, see Betty Hart and Todd Risley, Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children (Baltimore: Paul H. Brookes, 1995). 4. Mary Ann Darmer, "Developing Transfer and Metacognition in Educationally Disadvantaged Students: Effects of the Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) Program" (Doctoral dissertation, University of Arizona, 1995). 5. It was difficult to tell how much of this differential retention was due to higher dropout rates among the control students as opposed to the possibility that more of them simply moved out of the district. At the same time, the data strongly suggest a higher dropout rate among the control students. 6. In all four cases there were unusual circumstances that caused the retention, e.g., getting pregnant, being absent frequently to visit a father who lived in another state, or dealing with a mother in jail and the recent death of a brother. 7. Jean Schemo and Ford Fessenden, "Gains in Houston Schools: How Real Are They?," New York Times, 3 December 2003, pp. A-1, A-7. 8. For a discussion of the cognitive wall and a critique of the research on the sustained effects of early intervention, see Stanley Pogrow, "Beyond the Good Start Mentality," Education Week, 19 April 2000, pp. 44, 46. 9. For an example of those who argue that "learning disability" is not really a category of learning problem, see Louise Spear-Swerling and Robert J. Sternberg, "Curing Our 'Epidemic' of Learning Disabilities," Phi Delta Kappan, January 1998, pp. 397-401. 10. An indicator of the unique success of HOTS is that, when the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory compiled its list of validated programs, HOTS was lumped in the category of "other," along with a computerized drill program. When I asked why it was not put into a category called "thinking programs," I was told that it was the only one and that the lab could not have a category for just one program. In addition, the only other well-documented example of an intervention that reduces the learning gap on a large scale after the third grade that I can find is intensive involvement of 10th-graders in drama/theater productions. 11. As I indicated above, none of this is meant to say that we should not provide thinking experiences earlier, but the nature of the thinking activities and their balance with basic skills need to be different in the primary grades. 12. Recent reports of gains on federal tests were limited to the performance of 9-year-olds. Conversely, as predicted by the HOTS findings, reading scores for 13-year-olds were no higher than those in 1980. See Sam Dillon, "Young Students Post Solid Gains in Federal Tests," New York Times, 15 July 2005. 13. Students can start in HOTS as early as the middle of the third grade. In addition, Linda Schoolcraft of Cleveland County, North Carolina, has been experimenting with a variation of the program that begins in second grade. 14. When HOTS is provided after school, the students can meet fewer times a week, but the total number of minutes -- 165 to 180 -- must remain the same. 15. Alternatively, high-poverty schools that decide to use HOTS as a specialty program may choose to place only their stable students in HOTS and provide an alternative supplement to their mobile students. STANLEY POGROW wrote the original draft of this article when he held the William Allen Endowed Chair as a distinguished visiting professor at Seattle University. He is currently a professor of Educational Leadership at San Francisco State University. He can be reached at stanpogrow@att.net. |
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