The Effectiveness of Inquiry-Based Module to Empower the Students' Critical Thinking Skills

摘要

Critical thinking is one of the 4C skills of the 21st century have to be mastered by students to analyze the phenomena of science and think for the well-being in the world. Some factors are argued as the key points to nurture the skill, such as the learning strategies, and the content of learning which should contextually and inquiry-based presented. The purpose of this study was to determine the effectiveness of the module which was designed based on the inquiry-lesson to improve the students' critical thinking skills. Subjects were selected from the biggest Madrasah Aliyah (Islamic High School) and credited as - Al in Magetan District, East Java Province, Indonesia. This study was conducted in the academic year of 2016-2017. All eleventh-grade classes from the selected school were randomly selected to find out the two homogeneous classes for control and experiment class. A test for critical thinking was constructed based on the indicators by Facione. The independent t-test experiment resulted in the p-value of 0.000 (p <0.05). The score gap between pre- and post-test was 31.93% in the experiment class, while, the control class was 16.66%. Based on the results, it can be concluded that the inquiry-lesson-based module on human excretory system topics can effectively improve the students' critical thinking skills.