Communities Resolving Our Problems: the basic idea
[SUP: Sharing Problems] [THINK: Guidance] [LEAP: Solving Problems]

The Marzano Model for Thinking Skills

The Marzano model has eight categories of skills: focusing, information gathering, remembering, organizing, analyzing, generating, integrating, evaluating. The North Carolina curriculum team reduced the first three categories (focusing, information gathering, remembering) to a category called Knowledge. They inserted the category called applying from the Bloom model, a level that Marzano had dropped. They then used the other Marzano categories of skills so that the current set of seven thinking skill categories used by the schools of North Carolina reads: knowledge, organizing, applying , analyzing, generating, integrating, and evaluating. See the definitions of each of these seven terms.

 Robert Marzano has produced a number of works (bibliography) about his model and on its integration into school settings, with the primary text from which the rest descend being Dimensions of thinking : A framework for curriculum and instruction, 1988.

 What kind of questions can be asked based on this model? What expectations can we have about students at different grade levels in working with such questions? As a basis for comparing your developing skills and those of your students with others, there is a set of materials that can be helpful.

A three page document provides an overview of how thinking skills impact the development and evaluation of state tests. The SDPI provides a  student exams, answers and scorer notes as training material. The North Carolina State Department of Public Instruction has developed an extensive set of training materials, with examples of student essays and their scores for fourth and eighth grades. These web pages will include key parts of this material: an open ended essay question, a sample student response and the score for that sample. The student answers cover a range of scores on a four point scale from zero to three.

 The complete set of training materials for a range of subjects may be ordered from the Testing Section, Office of Accountability Services, North Carolina Department of Public Instruction, Raleigh, North Carolina. Ask for the booklets titled, North Carolina End-of-Grade Testing Program, Open-Ended State Test Results, 1993-1994.

[C.R.O.P. | Updated 7/14/2002 | Pageauthor Houghton ]