Educational Comic Strip as Visual Medium for Enhancing Learners’ Higher Order Thinking Skills in Economics

Abstract

The research paper entitled “Educational Comics Strip as Visual Medium for enhancing Learners’ Higher Order Thinking Skills in Economics” was conducted to identify the learners’ higher order thinking skills in terms of inference, analyzing, evaluating, and predicting using educational comic strips in Economics. Using a quasi-experimental method, it involved 34 purposively selected Grade 9 students of Bondoc Peninsula Agricultural High School during the school year 2021-2022. Data gathering was done online; the respondents through Google Forms accomplished a digitized version of the questionnaire. The students were given a self-made pre-test, and then engaged in a comic strip; afterward, a post-test was administered, followed by a survey questionnaire on their perception of the comic strip. Pearson product-moment correlation, t-Test, Mean and Standard Deviation were used to analyze and interpret the data. The result revealed that the students were in a very great extent-using comic strip in terms of multimodal communication, narrative experiences, text and images, and contextual clues. There is an improvement in the students’ Higher Order Thinking Skills. The pre-test resulted in less frequency of satisfactory to very satisfactory on inferring and analyzing and did not meet expectations on evaluating and predicting. While the post-test resulted in a greater frequency of very satisfactory to outstanding, compared to the pre-test, on inferring, analyzing, and predicting. This result implies that different type of questions on pretest and posttest with the same competencies affects the respondents’ post-test scores, especially in terms of analyzing and evaluating. Based on the findings, the following conclusions were derived. There is a significant difference in the students’ pre-test and post-test mean scores on Higher Order Thinking Skills assessment. Moreover, there is a significant relationship between the student’s perception of the use of comic strips in terms of multimodal communication, narrative experiences, text and images, and contextual clues, and their Higher Order Thinking Skills to analyze, evaluate and predict. Also, there is a significant relationship between their higher-order thinking skill inferring and multimodal communication, text, images, and contextual clues. Keywords: comic strip, Higher Order Thinking Skills, inferring, analyzing, evaluating, predicting