Developing Industry-Relevant Higher Order Thinking Skills in Computing Students

A 2016 survey commissioned by the British Higher Education Council revealed CS graduates had one of the highest unemployment rates. Industry sources attribute this to a growing gap between employer expectations and university curriculum. This gap primarily consists of soft skills and higher-order thinking skills, which include the ability to analyse, synthesise, evaluate, critique and design. Technical job advertisements increasingly specify higher order thinking skills as entry requirements for graduates. This paper presents the results of our work studying whether formative tasks can develop higher-order thinking skills. The formative tasks consisted of quizzes covering the first four levels of the Bloom's taxonomy. The higher-order thinking skills were measured based on the static and dynamic models students created for a real world problem, as part of the final exam. Our results reveal a strong correlation exists between application and analysis level quizzes and design activities needing higher-order thinking in the exam. Students repeating the quizzes several times also had better results than others in higher-order design skills. These results suggest that practising with well-constructed quizzes especially at the higher Bloom's level exercises the cognitive channels that help improve higher-order thinking skills.