RAISING STUDENTS’ COGNITIVE SKILLS, EXTENDING LEVEL OF TEXTBOOK QUESTIONS: CAN WE DO BOTH? Usha Viswanathan and Sahana Murthy Indian Institute of Technology–Bombay, Mumbai, India ushav@it.iitb.ac.in, sahanamurthy@iitb.ac.in A key objective of education is to help students develop higher level cognitive skills, such as, analyzing complex situations, making decisions and designing plans, along with learning subject content. While an assumption is that these can be acquired through textbooks, the exercises and questions in textbooks often fail to address higher order cognitive skills. Teachers can help by doing additional activities, but are hard pressed for time or hampered by lack of resources. Our idea to address this problem is to systematically extend textbook questions to address higher cognitive levels of revised Bloom’s Taxonomy. We developed additional questions for a computer textbook, for elementary students and conducted a study to examine if students are able to successfully solve these questions. Keywords: Revised Bloom’s taxonomy, Cognitive skills, Textbook INTRODUCTION The main goal of elementary education is to develop basic abilities in reading, writing, arithmetic and life skills which will help children to grow and lead a better life (Singh, Kumar, & Singh, 2006). Another goal of education is for students to learn the process of solving real-world problems (Hurd, 1998). A broader objective of this training is to help students develop higher cognitive skills so that they can think logically, analyze and take decisions in their later lives. An assumption in our educational system is that a large part of content knowledge and cognitive skills will be acquired by students through textbooks. A study conducted by the Educational Products Information Exchange institute, found that 90% of classroom teaching and activities are based on what is presented in the textbooks. (Cronnell & Humes, 1980; EPIEI, 1976). Studies on college textbooks show that while content knowledge is sometimes addressed in sufficient depth, the accompanying exercises and end-of-chapter questions fail to address higher order cognitive skills (Trachtenberg, 1973). The situation in school level textbooks is not much different. A study on computer textbooks in school level education found a similar pattern as above. Most textbooks focus primarily on computer usage skills such as entering and editing texts, creating spreadsheets, using a mouse/keyboard, etc. rather than on concepts (Iyer, Baru, Chitta, Khan, & Viswanathan, 2010). The accompanying questions which students are required to answer focus mostly on recalling facts. Some teachers are motivated to raise students’ cognitive skills through classroom activities, using resources other than textbooks. But this is difficult, as it is time consuming and often the prime concern of teachers is to cover the topics prescribed in the syllabus (Shymansky, Yore, & Good, 1990). To promote activity-based teaching, extensive training of teachers is required. A different option which can help in such a situation is to extend the exercises, problems and questions in existing textbooks, so as to accommodate questions which will prompt students to apply higher order cognitive skills (defined according to well-established learning taxonomies). This is much easier that rewriting the textbook or the curriculum itself. In this study, we focussed on extending the worksheet questions of an existing textbook and tried to provide an opportunity to elementary school students to develop higher order cognitive skills. We chose a textbook series, Computer Masti (2009) that is used in the Computers curriculum at the elementary level. The textbook adopts a learner-centric pedagogy in which children discuss their experiences, discover new concepts and experiment with new ideas. The textbook content simultaneously focuses on student learning of fundamental concepts, as well as thinking skills such as step-wise thinking and logical decision making. It has been pointed out that one cannot separate content from thinking skills such as critical analysis and evaluation, which are best learnt in the context of a subject (Raths, Jonas, Rothstein, Wassermann, 1967; Spache & Spache, 1986). The strategy followed in the Computer Masti books is consistent with the National Curriculum Framework 2005 (NCERT, 2005), which recommends that the primary aim of including information and communication technology in education is to help students make and support decisions in the process of solving real-life problems. The Computer Masti textbooks contain activities and worksheets at the end of each lesson. In this study, we