Costa's Level of Thinking

Content Questions

Overview

Costa's Levels of Thinking

Blooms and Costa's

Level 1

Level 3

Level 2

Costa's Levels of Thinking offer a framework for inquiry. This framework helps students ask thought-provoking questions about academic content, make connections among concepts, and deepen understanding of the content.

Level 1 Gathering/Google: Requires recall or basic understanding of information.Level 2 Processing/Noodle: May require connections to different ideas on a page/text or making inference related to an idea. Level 3 Applying/Doodle: Requires more information than is present in the text because it focuses on supporting an answer, providing evidence, justifying, and predicting an outcome.

Students: Access definitions, principles, and concepts from short- and long-term memory. Teachers: Guide students in gathering the data they will need to process a Level 2 or 3 question. Level 1 Thinking: Requires recall or basic understanding of information.

Students: Process or manipulate information to come up with the answer. Teachers: Support learners reading between the lines and assembling and relating multiple pieces of information to come up with the answer. Level 2 Thinking: May require making connections to different ideas on a page/text or making inferences related to an idea.

Students: Apply knowledge of the relationships between disparate concepts. Teachers: Support learners in outputting concepts and then backing up ideas with evidence. Level 3 Thinking: Requires more information than is present in the text because it focuses on supporting an answer, providing evidence, justifying, and predicting an outcome.

Please use this link to download the chart. You can open the chart to full screen by clicking on the image.

Please use this link for additional content questions and open ended starters for students.