Study of 3C-HEAT Integration Levels in Chinese ICT Lesson Plans
Shijuan Wang
Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japanwangshj@mr.hum.titech.ac.jp
Masao Murota
Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan
murota@hum.titech.ac.jp

Abstract: Critical Thinking, Creative Thinking, and Collaboration (3C) are the three importantfactors of 21st century skills. In Maxwell’s HEAT (Higher-order thinking, Engagement,Authenticity and Technology) instrument, High-order Thinking implies Critical Thinking &Creative Thinking, while Engagement involves Collaboration. However, her results do not show
3Cs’ integration levels in lesson plans clearly. Therefore, the purposes of this study are to (a)investigate 3Cs’ integration levels in lesson plans, and (b) analyze these three factors’ correlations
with their respective related factors. We have designed corresponding levels of 3C combining 7
levels (0-6) of HEAT, and analyzed 26 pieces of lesson plans gathered from advanced ICTteachers in high school in Shanghai, China. The findings show that (a) the integration levels ofAuthentic learning and Technology were low though ICT has close relationship with them; (b)compared with Creative Thinking, teachers were skilled at integrating Critical Thinking into theirinstruction; (3) the integration levels of Collaboration was low due to monotonous collaborative
methods. In order to find out the integration details of 3C in each lesson plan, we selected 12higher-score activities. We found that most teachers preferred design outreach activities todevelop students’ abilities and that the categories of instructional strategies were limited.

Key words: 21st Century Skills, Critical Thinking, Creative Thinking, Collaboration, Higherorder Thinking, Engagement

INTRODUCTION
How students learn is always being focused on and argued by educators. That’s because what students
should be equipped is always changing with the social development. In the 21st century, society needs students tomaster skills that help to increase their competitive power. The partnership for 21st century skills (2009) summarized
21st century learning skills into critical thinking, creative thinking, collaboration, and communication. Many active
learning instructional strategies have been proven to cultivate 21st century skills effectively. However, Chinese
middle and high school ICT teachers, have difficulty using these instructional strategies flexibly in their classes.
Higher-order thinking, engagement, authenticity, and technology (HEAT) are accepted as four importantfactors to promote student’s active learning. High integration levels of HEAT in learning are educators’ goals.
Because a lesson plan can describe and reflect a teacher’s instructional strategies and procedures in detail, analyzing
teachers’ lesson plans is a good way to investigate integration levels of HEAT. Some researchers have developed
assessment standards for each component of (Margaret Maxwell et al, 2011).
Our final objective is to cultivate students’ 21st century skills through Chinese ICT teachers in their classes.
In addition to HEAT components, we also focused on investigating the integration levels of 21st century skills critical thinking skill, creative thinking skill, and collaboration skill (3C), respectively.

PURPOSES OF THIS STUDY
The two purposes of this study are to:
1. Measure the integration level of 3C-HEAT in current lesson plans by using the 3CHEAT instrument.
2. Find out integration details of 3C in higher-score lesson plans.

RUBRIC DESIGNIn this study, we used an assessment rubric - 3CHEAT instrument - to score each component’s integrationlevels in gathered lesson plans. There are 7 levels (0 - 6) in the instrument, and a score of 0 to 6 assigned to each.
Level 0 scores 0, which means there is no component used in lesson plans. From level 1 to level 6, the integrationlevel increases gradually to incorporate awareness, application, exploration, integration, expansion, and refinement
components in sequence. Level 3 is the basic level. The 3CHEAT instrument is composed of two parts. One part isthe HEAT instrument designed by Margaret Maxwell et al. (2011), and the other one is the 3C instrument designedby the researchers.

3C rubric
We designed each 3Cs’ level based on the corresponding level of Margaret’s HEAT and its own essential
characters. Higher-order thinking of HEAT instrument is related to critical thinking and creative thinking, so, tosome degree, their levels should correspond. For example, the awareness level of higher-order thinking is “students
are learning at the knowledge level of Bloom’s Taxonomy”. Correspondingly, the awareness of critical thinking is inthat “students judge based on a single concrete knowledge” and the awareness of creative thinking contains“students think outside their knowledge”.

DATA COLLECTION
The course
We chose ICT as the course of our research. The first reason for choosing ICT over other subjects is thathigh school ICT course’s educational goal is to cultivate and promote students’ information literacy. The UnitedStates National Forum on Information Literacy defines information literacy as "― the ability to know when there isa need for information, to be able to identify, locate, evaluate, and effectively use that information for the issue orproblem at hand." The requirement of cultivating ability asks for teachers to focus on integrating 21st century skills
into instruction. Secondly, ICT course contents are related to the real life which contributes to use the authentic
learning in the classroom. In addition, academic pressure on ICT teachers is not as heavy as that of major courses.

Study object
We determined to analyze lesson plans of teachers in Shanghai. That is because Shanghai is one of the mostadvanced provinces in teaching ICT in China.

RESULTS & DISCUSSION
Table 1 shows frequencies and percentages of 3CHEAT components. In our study, levels under level 3 areconsidered unfavorable, and those above it (including it) are targets we want to meet.
From table 1, we found that each component’s mean, except that of critical thinking and higher-order
thinking, was lower than the basic level - 3. The lowest two means belonged to collaboration and technology. Forpercentages, we cared about the meeting target percentage. In HEAT components, higher-order thinking was thehighest scoring component, a result similar to that found in Margaret Maxwell’s research (97%). Except for higherorder thinking, the target percentages of the other three components were far lower than those found in Margaret

Maxwell’s research(91%, 82%, 94%), especially– those of authentic learning and technology. Technology
integration reached the target in only 23.1% lesson plans, even though ICT has a close relationship with technology.
Table 1: Frequencies and percentages of 3CHEAT components (N=26)
3CHEA 21st century skills
Higher-order Engagement
AuthenticTechnologyT level
learning
Critical T Creative T Collaboration thinking
0-2213172101420
7.7%
50%
65.4%
7.7%
38.5%
53.9%
76.9%
318107171092
69.2%
38.5%
26.9%
65.4%
38.5%
34.6%
7.7%
46327634
23.1%
11.5%
7.7 %
26.9%
23.1%
11.5%
15.4%
5-6
00000
00
Meeting 24
13924
16126target*
92.3%
50%
34.6%
92.3%
61.6%
46.1%
23.1%
Mean
3.08
2.42
2.04
3.12
2.77
2.23
2
*i.e. scoring at level 3 or above
In 3C components, critical thinking reached the target in 92.3% lesson plans- which ranked first. Creative
thinking reached the target in only half lesson plans. We concluded that, compared with critical thinking, ICT
teachers in Shanghai were not good at integrating creative thinking in their classes. Lesson plans in whichcollaboration reached the target level accounted for just 34.6%.
In fact, one lesson plan is combined with several activities. From beginning to end, they can be classified
into lead-in activity, instructional activity, outreach activity, and evaluation activity. These activities are not linear
and integral, so some lesson plans may contain two or three of them. Each activity has its 3CHEAT levels. In theanalysis above, we scored each component of a lesson plan by the highest score of all activities. This scoring method
could not display the details of 3C. Therefore, we selected 12 higher-score activities from 11lesson plans whosemeans are higher than the overall mean to analyze 3C. Table 2 displays the result.
Table 2: 3C methods of higher- score activities (N=12)
No.
Critical T Creative T
Collaboration
No.
Critical T Creative T Collaboration
Task
Task
Task
Task
Free discussion
A1*
A7*Question
Task
Peer discussion
Task
Task
A2A8*Problem
Problem
Question
Question
Free discussion
A3*
A9

Task
Task
Group working
Task
Task
Group working
A4
A10*
Question
Competing
Evaluation
Evaluation
Free discussion
A5
A11
Task
Task
Free discussion
Evaluation
Evaluation
Free discussion
A6*
A12
*i.e. outreach activity; i.e. instructional activity; i.e. evaluation activity
In these 12 activities, half belonged to the outreach activity, which was held to promote students’ abilities
at the end of instruction. This implied that most teachers were more accustomed to designing special outreachactivities to develop students’ abilities, rather than integrating skill cultivation into the instructional process.
Teachers were familiar with using tasks, problems, and questions to stimulate students’ critical and creative thinking.
Most tasks, problems and questions were close-ended. This type of organization belongs to skill application rather
than skill cultivation. In addition, methods of collaboration were confined to free discussion which is unorganized
and in which it is hard to ensure most/all students’ participation. This could explain why collaboration scored low.
Therefore, in order to cultivate students’ skills, our future research needs to focus on increasing integrationlevels of 3CHEAT and to conceive of how to transform the organization format to cultivate 21st century skills.

CONCLUSION
The integration levels of 3C-HEAT in current high school ICT lesson plans were not satisfied. We also
found out the activity categories, instructional strategies, and collaborative methods which are often used tostimulate students’ 3C skills by ICT teachers in Shanghai. These details provide us an important background tocultivate 21st century skills for future research.

REFERENCES
Margaret, M., Rebecca, R. S. & Janet, L. T. (2011). Analyzing HEAT of lesson plans in pre-service and advanced
teacher education. Journal of the Research Center for Educational Technology, 7(1), 102-112.
Laura, G. (2012). Assessing 21st century skills. United States: CORWIN a SAGE Company.
Information literacy. Wikipedia. Retrieved July 11th, 2013 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_literacy