Geography curricula objectives and students’ performance:enhancing the student’s higher-order thinking skills?

Abstract This paper centers on to evaluate whether and to what extent the learning objectives of the geography curricula emphasize students’ higher-order thinking skills (HOTS), and whether students are capable of answering to HOTS-questions by using the Finnish upper secondary geography education as an example. The revised Bloom’s taxonomy was used as a framework for the content analysis. The findings show that geography has the potential to enhance students’ HOTS, but students experience difficulties when answering to HOTS-questions. The results could be used to evaluate the desired thinking skills and knowledge dimensions in geography education for to enhance students meaningful learning