Thinking Hats For Assessment

By Judith Stanbridge and Bridget Spain, Wakari School.

Research Question
• Can thinking hats be used as a means of assessing the children’s deeper understanding of topic work?
Method
• The hats have been used as a teaching strategy over a few years. Our study involved New Entrant and
Year 2 children. Some of the New Entrant children had only been at school a very short time and
therefore has only a brief exposure to the hats.
Initial Testing
• After our pirate topic we put out the coloured thinking hats for the children to see.
• We interviewed each child saying “ I want you to do some thinking. What can you tell me about
pirates?”
• We recorded each child’s comments on the digital voice recorder.
• We recorded the number of hats used and which particular hats were used by each child.
• We recorded each child’s comments on the digital voice recorder.
Results
• After the first test we found that all the children used the white hat with some using the black hat. The
average use of hats was 2. The most was 5. This was the same for both groups.
• Similar results were obtained after the final test except that the red hat was the second most common
hat used.
• When we prompted the children to use different hats they were able to make comments using more of
the hats.

Initial Hats Data Year 0

How
many
hats
name red yellow black white green blue used?

1 1 1 2
2 1 1 1 1 1 5
3 1 1 1 3
4 1 1
5 1 1 2
6 1 1 1 3
7 1 1 1 3
8 1 1
9 1 1 2
10 1 1 2
 Initial Hats Data Year 2
How
many
hats
name red yellow black white green blue used?
a 1 1 2
b 1 1 2
c 1 1 2
d 1 1 2
e 1 1 1 1 4
f 1 1 1 4
g 1 1 1 1 4
h 1 1 1 1 4
i 1 1
j 1 1 2
k 1 1 1 3
l 1 1 1 3
m 1 1 1 1
n 1 1
o 1 1 2
p 1 1 2
q 1 1
r 1 1 1 3
s 1 1
t 1 1 2

Final Hats Data Year 0

How
many
hats
name red yellow black white green blue used?

1 1 1 1 1 1 5
2 1 1 1 1 4
3 1 1 1 3
4 1 1 2
5 1 1
6 1 1
7 1 1 2
8 1 1
9 1 1 2
10 1 1
 Final Hats Data Year 2
How
many
hats
name red yellow black white green blue used?
a 1 1 1 3
b 1 1 1 3
c 1 1 1 3
d 1 1 2
e 1 1 1 1 4
f 1 1 1 3
g 1 1 1 3
h 1 1 2
i 1 1 1 1 1 5
j 1 1 1 3
k 1 1 2
l 1 1 2
m 1 1 1 3
n 1 1 2
o 1 1 1 3
p 1 1 1 3
q 1 1 1 1 4
r 1 1
s 1 1 2
t 1 1 1 1

Conclusions
• At this level the children understand what the hats mean but cannot independently express their
thoughts using the range of hats.
• They can independently recall facts which was what we were trying to move away from in our
summative assessments.
• They still require prompting to express their deeper thinking about the topic.
• The kind of topic will effect hat usage because some topics will elicit more responses from certain
hats.
Next Steps
• We are going to try a more directive use of the thinking hats from ‘Take a moment’ by Kath
Murdoch.