Findings such as these suggest that high order pedagogy can overcome some of the disadvantages that apply to students at risk who tend, in most school settings, to receive the lowest levels of curriculum and instruction. There are several closely related descriptors used in educational research to define what is meant by complex or high order thinking skills and that describe the process for achieving higher order thinking in classrooms. If actually producing knowledge is a general defining characteristic, then high order skills are those used in creation of original thoughts and ideas. Though critically important to academic achievement and to productivity in the workplace, a complex and higher order thinking curriculum is not characteristic of the American high school. The Japanese focused on concepts and conceptual understanding.
Teachers ask questions for different reasons in the United States and Japan.
A common type of lesson in Asian classrooms is one that asks students to invent and evaluate different ways of solving the same problem without worrying about specifying an answer. The Japanese recognize the value of focusing on student mistakes as a means for helping them to learn. They relate many student-teacher exchanges where students were asked to explain their reasoning that led to a wrong answer. In contrast, American teachers seemed to want students to use a single problem solving strategy and tended not to use student mistakes as a platform to examine the thinking process. This also defines the challenge of creating authentic forms of assessment that parallel reforms in curriculum and instruction.