E-catalog        

Библиогр.: 43 назв.

This publication addresses the issue of cognitive skills as a challenge for the teachers and an asset for the learners. Despite the unanimity in accepting cognitive skills development as a rightful educational agenda, teaching practitioners give preference to the development of lower-order cognitive skills in learners. The reason lies not only the backwash effect of closed-ended testing tasks, but also teachers’ beliefs. The hypothesis of the research consists in the following proposition: cognitive skills growth in the classroom depends on explicit training of lower- and higher-order cognitive skills. This research draws on teachers’ opinion poll, follow-up interviews and a case study of teaching students of engineering specialties a set of higher-order cognitive skills in their lessons of English. Cognitive skills enable the learner to work out the four types of knowledge such as, factual (facts and events), conceptual (theories and models), procedural (methodology and processes), and metacognitive (awareness of ways and practices of critical thinking). These types of knowledge, based on higher-order thinking, enable the learners to make wellinformed decisions as a result of productive thinking. Creative procedures of knowledge generation and application enhance learners’ cognitive abilities further on. The article considers the barrier raised by the teaching community that gives preference to challenging learners with acquiring the ready-made knowledge rather than with the knowledge-producing tasks. Ready-made knowledge acquisition seems to be more appealing to both teachers and students, because of the fast-gained results, while cognitive skills development bears fruit much later. The truth is that there is no fast track towards higherorder cognitive skills development. Therefore, declarative knowledge prevails.