Collaboration activities significantly support higher-order thinking within Bloom's Taxonomy by engaging students in Application  Analysis, and Evaluation levels of thinking. 

Application and Analysis Thinking

• Collaborative activities encourage students to break down concepts or ideas into their constituent parts and understand the relationships among them. When working in groups, students must articulate their understanding, apply what they know, compare different perspectives, and jointly identify underlying issues.

• The very act of collaboratively formulating novel questions, solutions, or products is an act of creation, involving the bringing together of disparate parts of knowledge to form a new whole. Collaboration enables brainstorming, combining diverse ideas, and devising innovative approaches.

• Collaborative tasks require students to make informed judgments about the value of ideas or materials, using standards and criteria to support their opinions and views. Through group discussions and debates, students critique information and assess its completeness or clarity.

By engaging in collaborative activities, students are continually prompted to ask questions that drive their collective inquiry, analysis, evaluation, and creation of knowledge. This process is essential for growing cognition and developing students' higher-level thinking abilities.

• Interact in pairs or small groups on learning activities and collaborative documents

• Collectively address and resolve critical issues

• Consider alternatives and resources together

• Build consensus and work with a shared purpose

• Collaborative tools themselves can be used to assess learning, requiring students to evaluate their own work or peers' contributions.

• Writing a TV show, play, song, or pantomime about a topic as a group integrates various aspects of understanding into a new, creative product.

• Using Venn Diagrams in groups to compare and contrast topics requires students to differentiate and examine information collectively.

• Designing questionnaires or surveys as a group to gather information forces students to analyze what questions are most relevant and how data can be categorized and interpreted. This involves asking questions like, "How can you classify these different parts?".

• Creating flowcharts collaboratively to show the critical stages of a process necessitates a joint analysis of sequences and relationships.

• Conducting investigations to produce information that supports a view in a team setting leads to analytical questions, such as, "What explanation do you have for this phenomenon?" or "What is the problem with...?"

• Preparing and conducting debates as a team prompts students to evaluate arguments and justify their positions, generating questions like, "What criteria would you use to assess...?" or "Do you think... is a good or a bad thing?"

• Forming panels to discuss viewpoints encourages collaborative evaluation and prioritization of information.

• Preparing a case to present their view in a group necessitates assessing the strength of evidence and making recommendations.

• Inventing a new product or designing a robot as a group project requires students to generate innovative ideas and plan their implementation. This leads to questions like, "How can I design a solution to this problem?" or "What could I invent...?"

• Developing a menu for a new restaurant or designing a new monetary system in a team setting promotes creative problem-solving and the formulation of new concepts.

• When working in groups, assign roles

• Change the roles and groupings from time to time

• Students have primary responsibility for their own product, but also act as thought partners or reviewers for each other

• Use timers and set expectations for each stage of the project

• Explicitly define the rubric, time, and purpose

• Let students know that the teacher constantly monitors and assesses progress

• Students should have collective responsibility for a shared product that they must develop together