A Vocal Approach in Measuring Critical Thinking Skill in Elementary School Students

Abstract

Critical thinking is an important skill in the 21st century. With the awareness of the importance of critical thinking skill, schools have invested much effort in including the development of critical thinking skill in their curriculum. Yet, there has not been much critical thinking assessments available to measure students’ critical thinking skill as an independent skill, especially for elementary school students. Past research have venture into developing critical thinking skill assessments using children stories and folk stories by using different input methods (i.e., written and vocal assessment). However, there was a research gap in between these research where the effect of both input method on the critical thinking assessment was not explored. Hence, this research utilized a local folk story to design a critical thinking assessment, instead of using a conventional written assessment, a vocal assessment with a recording function was used to compare the difference of both assessments. The results indicates that there were no difference in the different input method on the effectiveness of the designed critical thinking assessment in assessing students’ critical thinking skill. However, other interesting elements were found in this research, including a noticeable difference in the students’ performance on certain questions, and the difference in the students’ perception in terms of the difficulty of the questions and their intention to have their peers participate in the research.