How are student’s cognitive patterns viewed from higher-order thinking skills in kinematics?

Abstract

Higher-Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) is an ability that must be achieved by students today because this ability is the core of assessment in K13 and also as demand for 21st-century skills. Giving HOTS-based tests is an attempt to explore further the extent to which HOTS is mastered by students in kinematics and also describe cognitive patterns based on student’s HOTS. The method used in this study is descriptive, with an in-depth analysis of student answers. The research subjects were 51 students. The test instrument used consisted of five HOTS questions, which were divided into two analyzing questions, 1 evaluating question and 2 creating questions, has a reliability coefficient of 0.85 with considered high. The results of the study show that the cognitive patterns of students with high HOTS tend to be stable increasing following cognitive levels, for cognitive patterns of students with medium HOTS are having an up and down pattern, while the cognitive patterns of students with low HOTS tend to decline at higher cognitive levels. The whole HOTS in this study is relatively low because only 3.92% of students can reach high HOTS. Thus, it is necessary to apply of learning model such as Problem Based Learning to train students for higher order thinking in solving physics problems.