Critical Thinking Skills of Fifth Grade Elementary School Students in Bandung City on the Topic of Water Cycle in Natural Science Subjects

Abstract

Critical thinking skills are skills that a person needs to have. Therefore developing students’ critical thinking skills is one of the main goals in 21st century education. The purpose of this study is to describe the critical thinking skills of fifth grade elementary school students on natural science subjects on water cycle topics. The research method used in this research is a quantitative descriptive method. The participants of this study were 25 elementary school students in Bandung city. The data is collecting by tests, interviews and documentation. After the data is obtained, the test is processed and analyzed using quantitative methods. The results of interviews and documentation studies were analyzed using descriptive methods. The research results showed that the critical thinking skills of fifth grade students in the elementary school of Bandung city were in the very poor category. The average score of students’ critical thinking skills is 48.3 (very low). The interview results show that students’ critical thinking skills are low because students do not like the type of description questions and because they did not willing to write. Students, who are in the low and medium category, are having another reason, which is they do not like to learn science.

The Influence of Process Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning (POGIL) Model Assisted by Realia Media to Improve Scientific Literacy and Critical Thinking Skill of Primary School Students

“…Nonetheless, a research on scientific literacy in the primary school level is limited on instructional intervention (Lee et al, 2005), the use of robotics (Cejka, 2006), the use of integrated approach (Cervetti et al, 2012), STEM learning (Rochman et al, 2019;, Guided experiments book based on SETS (Prasasti & Listiani, 2019), and the water cycle theme (Sujana et al, 2019). Whereas, researches about critical thinking in science learning of primary school level are on the implementation of Evocation, Realization of meaning, and Reflection step (Florea & Hurjui, 2015), Science Writing Heuristic approach in fifth grade (Hand et al, 2018), the implementation of digital game-based learning in fifth grade (Hussein & Ow, 2019), RADEC model in fourth grade (Satria & Sopandi, 2019), topic of water cycle in fifth grade (Syaodih et al, 2019), problem-based learning (Zuryanty et al, 2019), Lectora Inspire media assisted guided inquiry method in fifth grade (Reffiane et al, 2019), as well as STEM in fifth grade (Elfrida et al, 2019). Those various researches also become a basic that the aspect of critical thinking can already be developed and investigated on the high classes of primary school (fourth to sixth grade).…”

The Effect of STEM Autonomous Learning City Map Application on Students’ Critical Thinking Skills

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