Thinking Skills - Overview
With the recent announcement that Thinking Skills would be replacing the General Ability section in both the OC and Selective Test this year, many parents and students have been left clueless, wondering what type of questions to expect in the upcoming exams. This blog has been designed to provide an overview of what styles of questions to expect in the Thinking Skills section.
There are altogether 8 different styles of Thinking Skills questions. Most questions can be sorted into two major categories:
Problem Solving
Critical Thinking
Problem Solving
The problem solving questions primarily assess the student’s ability to find or create a solution to a given problem using their numerical skills. The rationale behind these questions is that many of the problems that are encountered in the real world are unique and new. Often, there won’t be an available solution that you can just find by searching on the internet or asking others. Thus, these problem solving questions have been included to encourage and test the student’s ability to creatively come up with their own methods to solve a particular problem.
Bear in mind that these solutions often do require knowledge of certain mathematical concepts such as fractions, ratios, percentages, and even algebra. Thus, becoming a master of these problem solving questions requires both an understanding of basic mathematical concepts as well as the ability to know how to apply this knowledge to different scenarios and situations.
There are altogether three different kinds of problem solving questions, each assessing a different aspect/skill set required to solve an unfamiliar problem. These three styles are relevant sections, finding procedures and identifying similarities. However, please keep in mind, while most questions fall into one category, some questions may fit into two or more of the categories.
Critical Thinking
The critical thinking questions assess the student’s ability to critically analyse and understand arguments using their language and English skills. Depending on the question type, they may need to logically draw conclusions, identify a flaw in the argument’s reasoning or assess the impact of any additional evidence.
The rationale behind these styles of questions is to encourage children to think critically about arguments and information that they exposed to. This is especially important in our current modern society where we are constantly stimulated by media and information outlets that can often be feeding us misleading information. Thus, these questions are also designed to enable children to logically draw conclusions from presented arguments and identify flaws/assumptions in given information.
There are altogether 4 different types of critical thinking questions, each assessing a different aspect required to think critically and logically. However, although most questions fall into one category, some questions may assess one or more of these aspects of critical thinking.
The last type of question that may appear in the Thinking Skills exam is Visual Spatial Reasoning. This question does not fall under problem solving or critical thinking and is one that used to appear in the General Ability section of both OC and Selective Tests.
For more details on each topic, please refer to each file below.
Published 22 February 2021, last edited 24th February 2022