Teachers' perceptions of thinking skills in the primary curriculum

The study reported in this article examines primary teachers' understandings of thinking skills within the curriculum. All respondents were from primary schools within a local authority in central Scotland, and in total thirty-six schools were represented. Practitioners' perceptions were explored by analysing their quantitative responses to questions about the frequency of specific thinking skills taught across curricular areas. The methods and procedure adopted for this study were based on the thinking frameworks of Swartz and Parks (1994) and McGuinness (2003). Data were coded using parametric statistics to reveal developmental trends apparent when teaching thinking skills. The findings showed that teachers believed that some thinking skills are more fully integrated into areas of the curriculum than others and also highlighted the lack of a coherent progression of age-specific thinking skills being taught from early to upper primary.