Teachers’ activities during designing Higher-Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) mathematical questions through teacher assisting program

Abstract

Support for primary school teachers when designing mathematical questions would be crucial since many teachers were not able to develop mathematical questions that could train students to reach higher order thinking skills. This study aims to provide teachers with guidancein designing HOTS questions as a part of the development process of teaching instruments by using Plomp model. This paper only explains teachers’ activities during the assisting programs in the prototyping phase. The assisting programs were conducted in four meetings and involved ten primary school teachers in Banda Aceh, Indonesia. The findings showed that teachers’ activities during the first assisting program in designing HOTS questions were not as effective as had been intended, due to the lack of teachers’attention to the tutor’s instructions during the program. Meanwhile, the second assisting program showed an effective result on all components of teachers’ activities. This program could potentially be applied to other mathematics topics involving many teachers, which is the main program in the next phase of this development research.