In Bloom’s taxonomy there are six levels: knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. Higher order thinking skills are those skills in the top three levels: analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. These three skill levels are important in critical thinking
The concept of HOTS is a fundamental shift in Evaluation Reform that aims at promoting thinking skills in learners and taking them away from rote learning. Higher level mental abilities of the learners such as to analyze, interpret, reason out, synthesize or evaluate the given information are likely to enable them transfer learning to totally different situations.
CBSE has included in HOTS questions in there examination pattern.Inclusion of questions based on testing higher order thinking skills in the question paper has certainly affected teaching-learning processes. The typology of such questions include open-ended questions, data-based questions, graph-based questions, activity-based questions and reasoning-based questions.