The Higher Order Thinking Skills of Students on Visayan Poems

Abstract

Dissecting the understanding of the students on Visayan poems prevails appreciations. This intensifies the level of comprehension and interpretation towards poems. This explanatory sequential research dissected the higher order thinking skills of English major students. This project focused on the identification and understanding of the students’ weakness in analyzing, comprehending, and understanding the Visayan poems. The researcher crafted the researcher-made test and identified the level of the higher order thinking skills of the students. Both generation and explanation skills of the students were found to be on satisfactory levels while selection skill is considered as the major problem in which students had a difficulty in answering the test on Visayan poems. Using this finding, the researcher conducted a semi-structured interview for further investigation. In the interview, it was found that students have difficulty in answering the test questions. This difficulty specifically includes: distinguishing the open-ended type of test, such as uncertainty in identifying the meaning per stanza like ability of categorizing the connotative meaning, and ability of recognizing the denotative meaning; identifying the meaning of the symbols; understanding the implication of the poem; identifying the meaning thru figurative language; translating the Visayan words and phrases; and using appropriate words or diction. Given this result, an extensive review of the curriculum is much needed to address the emerging problem.