Research trends of science process skills in Indonesian science education journals

Abstract

Science process skills (SPS) are considered essential for scientific and technological eras nowadays. This study aims to provide information on how SPS in Indonesia have been researched from 2016 to 2022, including the number of studies conducted, research designs used, frequently addressed science topics, interventions, assessment instruments used, and data analysis techniques applied. We applied content analysis across numerous science education journals authored in Indonesia over 7 years. The analysed articles were filtered from 14 Indonesian science education journals selected from the SINTA database with SINTA 1-6 index ratings. Articles were searched using keywords such as "Science Process Skills and Science Education" and the selection resulted in the review of 86 articles. This up-to-date research has revealed a fluctuation in the number of articles mainly focused on SPS from year to year. Among those articles, quantitative research was the researchers' most popular method for examining SPS. 8th grade Junior High School (JHS) and 10th grade Senior High School (SHS) pupils were frequently chosen as study participants. The most frequently selected topic for the study of SPS were physics (38%), biology (33%), chemistry (9%), and unidentified topics (20%). Inquiry-based learning was the most common research focus, with test sheets and t-tests being the most frequently utilised for analysing data. This SPS review research is important to provide results to identify future areas of research and promote the development of SPS in science education. Several suggestions for future studies on SPS have been made based on the study's outcomes.