Unlike conventional classroom questions, thinking-skills problems may present students with unfamiliar information and require them to work out the underlying rule or relationship.

For example, a question might provide a sequence of shapes, numbers or symbols and ask students to determine what comes next. Another problem may provide several statements and require students to identify which conclusion logically follows.

The important point is that students are not necessarily being tested on a single piece of memorised knowledge. They are being asked to process information and apply reasoning.

Parents can support these skills through activities such as:

• Pattern-recognition problems

• Logic puzzles

• Number sequences

• Classification tasks

• Spatial reasoning activities

• “What if?” problem-solving questions

However, simply doing puzzles is not enough. Ask your child to explain how they reached the answer.

Questions such as “What pattern did you notice?” and “How did you eliminate the other options?” encourage metacognition—the ability to think about one's own thinking.

For selective preparation, the objective should be to develop a repeatable reasoning process: observe, identify relationships, test possibilities, eliminate incorrect options and select the strongest solution.