The development of measurement tools for senior high school students’ critical thinking skills in chemistry

Critical thinking skills are highly needed by senior high school students as they are the basic skills for understanding chemistry concepts. The evaluation tool was used to know the students’ achievement in developing their critical thinking skill. The objective of this study is to develop and validate the measurement tool of students’ critical thinking skill in chemistry. This research used Research and Development of Borg and Gall (1989) model that consists of three stages, i.e. introduction, development of product, and implementation of product. The location of study was at some senior high schools (SMA) in Cirebon City (Coastal area), Kuningan Regency (agricultural area), and Majalengka Regency (industrial area). The subjects in this study were students at second grade of some senior high schools majoring in natural science selected randomly totaling 1,314 people. The instrument used in this study was a graded multiple choice written test. Quantitative data in the form of students’ critical thinking scores are processed using Anova test. Study results show that: Indicators of critical thinking accommodated in developing measurement tools for senior high school students’ critical thinking in chemistry are: (1) elementary clarification (37.9%), basic support (3.16%), inference (55.8%), advance clarification (2.11%), and strategy and tactics (1.00%); (2) The characteristics of critical thinking test items developed met the requirement of good test items. In the concept of hydrocarbon, thermochemistry, and chemical equilibrium, discrimination index ranges 0.4 < DP ≤ 0.7, difficulty index ranges 0,1 < IK ≤ 0.7, coefficient of correlation ranges 0.2 < r_xy ≤ 0.6, and reliability ranges 0.4 < r₁₁ ≤ 1.0)- (3) average senior high school students’ critical thinking increased in Majalengka Regency at (=29.2), Kuningan Regency at (=27,0), and Cirebon City at (=33,4)-and (4) !verage students’ critical thinking skill in the concepts increased on: chemical equilibrium at (=21.13), thermochemistry at (=33.6), and hydrocarbon at (=33.7).