Analogies as an overlooked tool for fostering students’ higher-order thinking: insights from graduate teaching assistant training

Teaching higher-order thinking skills (HOTS) is an explicit but elusive goal of universities. Reviews of instructional strategies for promoting HOTS do not include the use of analogies; however, in our introductory pedagogy courses, we found 58% of participants designed HOTS-focused assessments of student learning after a module on systematic teaching with analogies, a far better result than found in many analyses of university and professional exams. In this paper, we present a dual contribution: first, we highlight analogies as an overlooked but powerful strategy for fostering HOTS in university instruction. Second, we examine the structured tool that facilitated this result and argue that recipe-like tools, while sometimes critiqued as restrictive, can in fact scaffold complex instructions, design out common pitfalls, and provide instructors with a clear pathway to apply new ways of teaching; they warrant greater consideration in academic development practice.