•“Name the states that border California.” (Naming)
•“How does the picture make you feel?” (Describing)
•“What word does this picture go with?” (Matching)
•“Define the word haggard.” (Defining)
•“What did you see the man doing in the film?” (Observing)
•“Which ball is the blue one?” (Identifying)
•“How does the Gettysburg Address begin?” (Reciting)
•“How many coins are in the stack?” (Counting)
•“Which words in this list rhyme?” (Selecting)
•“The Mexican houses were made of mud bricks called... what?”
(Completing)
•“Watch what color it turns when I put the litmus paper in the
liquid.” (Observing)
•“List the first four numbers in a set of positive integers.” (Listing)
•“How did you feel about the grade you received in science?”
(Recalling)
Processing
Te a c h e r s c a n g u i d e s t u d e n t s t o p r o c e s s d a t a i n m a n y w a y s. S o m e -
times teachers design questions and statements to seek cause-and-effect
relationships. Other questions lead students to synthesize, analyze, sum-
marize, compare, contrast, or classify. Several other cognitive processes
are included at this level of thinking: distinguishing, making analogies,
categorizing, experimenting, organizing, explaining, sequencing, group-
ing, and inferring. Here are examples of questions designed to elicit cog-
nitive objectives at the processing level:
•“In what ways do you see the Civil War as being like the Revolu-
tionary War?” (Comparing)
•“What suggests to you that Columbus believed he could get to the
East by sailing west?” (Explaining)
•“From our experiments with food coloring in different water tem-
peratures, what might you infer about the movement of molecules?”
(Inferring)
•“How might you arrange the rocks in the order of their size?”
(Sequencing)
140 Learning and Leading with Habits of Mind