The purpose of the research is to develop and identify the validity of factors affecting higher order thinking skills (HOTS) of students. The thinking skills can be divided into three types: analytical, critical, and creative thinking. This analysis is done by applying the meta-analytic structural equation modeling (MASEM) based on a database of 166 primary empirical studies. The research results assert the theories and bring conceptual and empirical clarity to the factors affecting HOTS of students and also give readers an understanding of the magnitude and significance of relationships among the variables in the model. MASEM results confirm that classroom environment, psychological and intellectual characteristics of students have direct effects on HOTS (96.8% explained variance). Whereas, the family characteristic had insignificant effects on HOTS but they had indirect effects on HOTS through psychological characteristic. Furthermore, we show that the most direct effects on HOTS were psychological characteristic, classroom environment and intellectual characteristic, respectively. This study provided a holistic view on the relationship of factors affecting HOTS and proposed a direction for future research and practice.Key words: Higher order thinking skills, meta-analytic structural equation modeling, classroom environment, family characteristic, psychological characteristic, intellectual characteristic.
INTRODUCTIONHigher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) is a thinking process, which consists of complicated procedures and needs to be based on various skills such as analysis, synthesis, comparison, inference, interpretation, assessment, and inductive and deductive reasoning to be employed to solve unfamiliar problems (Smith, 1992;Zohar and Dori, 2003). The characteristics of students with HOTS are open-mindedness for risk-taking, curiosity, keen on fact discovery, planning and indicating the most suitable method, have a systems thinking process, think carefully, use evidence to think rationally and frequent self-monitoring (Shari et al., 1993). The students with HOTS are able to create new knowledge and make appropriate and logical decisions. Information and technology advancement greatly influences the current society. Consequently, learning management must be adapted to the current situation/society and focus on improving HOTS of students.There are many concepts of HOTS applied to the educational development of students and these concepts have been studied for years and used for teaching and learning in the classroom and the research of factors contributing to students' HOTS development (Noble and Powell, 1995;Rajendran, 2001;O'Tuel and Bullard, 2001;Marshall , Robert and Horton, 2011;Magno, 2011;Fischer et al., 2011;Kondak and Ayden, 2013). Within the thinking process literature, there are many factors affecting HOTS: classroom environment, family characteristic, psychological characteristic, and intelligence (Horan, 2007;Silvia, 2008;Pannells and Claxton, 2008;Lim and Smith, 2008;Chini et al., 2009;Pascarella ...