Higher Order Thinking Skills Among Secondary School Students in Science Learning

Abstract

A central goal of science education is to help students to develop their higher order thinking skills to enable them to face the challenges of daily life. Enhancing students’ higher order thinking skills is the main goal of the Kurdish Science Curriculum in the Iraqi-Kurdistan region. This study aimed at assessing 7th grade students’ higher order thinking skills level. The higher order thinking level test (HOTLT) was developed based on the Bloom Taxonomy of cognitive domain and consisted of 20 multiple-choice questions. The test was distributed to a randomly chosen sample comprising 418 7th grade students in the Iraqi-Kurdistan region. The overall findings revealed that the majority of the 7th grade students were at lower level of thinking skills (LOTL) n = 278 (79.7%). More male students were at lower level than female students. However, there was no significant difference between students’ level of higher order thinking skills and their gender (p > 0.05). Based on the results of students’ level of higher order thinking skills, the study provided evidence that almost all students needs to improve their higher order thinking skills especially the synthesis and evaluation skills required for improving students’ creativity in science.