What can students show about higher order thinking skills in physics learning?

Abstract

Higher order thinking skills are the ability to think not just recall, restate, or recite but it reaches several dimensions of knowledge, including metacognitive dimensions. Students who have higher order thinking skills will be have the ability of connect different concepts, interpret, problem solving, communication, reasoning, and make the right decisions. Identification of higher order thinking skills needs to be done through research and the results are expected to be used as a reference to design of instructional strategies that are appropriate to the characteristics of students. In this study, identification is done by measuring the ability of problem solving, communication, and reasoning skills. The results showed that students’ ability to solve of well structured problem including satisfactory but the ability to solve of ill structured problem needs to be developed. For communication skill, students are still not used to expressing their ideas in scientific writing. For reasoning skill, although students are able to reason on some aspects, but in general still not satisfactory. Therefore, it is necessary to develop a proper physics instructional design and in accordance with the characteristics of students to teach higher order thinking skills.