But the goal is still assessing (rather than teaching) students. In the current curriculum, teachers are tasked to design sets of questions to engage students’ analytical cognition – commonly known among teachers as “ Higher Order Thinking Skills”. The fault doesn’t just lie with teachersĪlthough the government has included critical thinking as learning objectives for students, traces of the testing mentality are also still evident in recent education policies aimed at fostering the skill. Since students are fully aware teachers will evaluate their answers, they feel uncomfortable about participating in classroom activities. This also deters students from asking questions and positions them as passive recipients of knowledge. As they are stuck in these initiate-respond-evaluate patterns, after evaluating students’ responses, teachers quickly move on to next questions instead of allowing further and richer discussion to emerge. This obsession with high scores and right answers is not compatible with teaching for critical thinking, which requires students to apply, analyse, evaluate and create solutions to problems.Īnother finding in our study is that teachers often miss out on opportunities to promote critical thinking in their questioning activity. The assessment methods changed, but the testing mentality remained. In response, however, teachers still focused on ensuring students could ace these new standards and evaluations with high marks. These were low-stakes tests and used strictly for measuring and evaluating the progress of students’ learning nationwide. PISA-inspired tests will replace Indonesia's national exams in 2021: how should they be implemented?įor instance, in addition to introducing learning objectives for critical thinking, the government also established a new PISA-like assessment to replace the old exams. Though Indonesia’s education ministry stopped these exams – first introduced in 1965 – in 2020, their 55-year effects still linger among teachers. Teachers have long been expected to prepare students for high-stakes, largely multiple choice exams, such as the National Exams ( Ujian Nasional). This sort of teaching mentality is still pervasive in Indonesia. In other words, teachers stick to merely “testing” or “quizzing” students and telling them whether the answer is correct. In our study of English classrooms in a number of Indonesian high schools, we found that instead of encouraging students to think and reflect, teachers strictly follow an “initiate-respond-evaluate” pattern of instruction. One reason for this problem lies in the questions Indonesian teachers pose in their classrooms. They attained very low marks in a number of critical thinking-related indicators – namely literacy and numeracy. In the latest Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) tests in 2018, Indonesian students ranked within the bottom ten out of nearly 80 participating countries. This includes a culture of rote learning (lessons based on memorizing information) and “teaching to test”. Though awareness of critical thinking is high, when teaching the skill, teachers still fall back on old habits ingrained in Indonesian education. Yet despite the existence of such policies, our recent study finds that many Indonesian teachers still struggle to teach and cultivate the skill.
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