Benjamin Bloom (1956) developed a classification of levels of intellectual behaviour in learning. His taxonomy covers three domains: the cognitive, psychomotor, and affective.

Within the cognitive domain, he identified six levels: remembering (knowledge), understaning (comprehension), applying (application), analysis, synthesis, and evaluation.

All academic subjects, as well as chess, provide a simple and direct way to develop the three lower order thinking skills – Remembering, Understanding and Applying.

(Bloom’s Taxonomy is traditionally a pyramid, but in this rearranged version, creating, evaluating, and analyzing have been placed simultaneously at the top, because full inquiry in a next generation classroom requires simultaneous use of these skills.)

However, academic subjects rarely provide a way to teach any of those higher order skills – Analysing, Evaluating and Creating.

Those three skills – analysis, evaluation and creation – are all involved at every step of a chess game! It is a perfect description of chess playing.

Chess provides the perfect educational cutlery for teaching those higher order thinking skills, using a combination of both critical thinking and creative thinking.