Higher-order thinking

Higher-order thinking (HOT) is a fundamental concept of Education reform based on Bloom's Taxonomy. Rather than simply teaching recall of facts, students will be taught reasoning and processes, and be better lifelong learners.

Critics say HOT is just a fuzzy excuse to stop teaching the 3Rs. It has been said that this is a way to get around teaching of any fixed body of facts, and teach how to solve any problem without being taught any facts or methods. Tests based on this will actually become more like IQ tests than tests based on taught curriculum content.

Standards based testing
Standards based tests rely on HOTS for many test items released by U.S. states such as Washington. For example, one fourth grade WASL problem published in 1997 asked how to measure the height of a flagpole given a sun, shadows, a ruler and a fire hydrant. A standard solution for this problem uses similar triangles, a skill not remembered by most adults, and which does not appear on state mathematics standards until the 10th grade. However, the solution published in the Seattle Post Intelligencer does not even use this method.

Mathematics
Similarly, textbooks such as Dale Seymour's Investigations omit many standard arithmetic methods, instead relying on students to construct their own ways to compute averages, and perform multiplication and division. Teachers are directed to discourage students who may have been taught how to regroup or take a sum and divide by the number of items to compute an average.