Exploring students’ critical thinking skills in a geometry lesson

Abstract

The ability of critical thinking in mathematics is an important ability that should be mastered by students. The goal of this research is to describe students’ critical thinking in a geometry lesson. This research is a survey study in which the data are taken by the documentation. Students’ answers used in this data based on critical thinking questions in which 17 students’ in 8th grade on one of the junior high schools in Yogyakarta are involved in this research. Students’ critical thinking instruments consist of 6 questions which have three aspects, namely analyzing, evaluating, and concluding in which each is with a picture and without the picture. The result of this research shows that analyzing aspect with picture questions has a better result compare to the question without picture. Similarly, in evaluating and concluding aspects, the data show that students’ answers are better with the picture rather than the question without the picture. Furthermore, from the results of the sample students’ exploration answers, it is expected that learning in future geometry can facilitate students’ critical thinking skills then, the learning of geometry is better presented by using the pictures.