Analysis of Critical Thinking Skills of High School Students

Abstract

Critical thinking skills are one of the 21st century skills that students must have based on the passing competency standards issued by the Indonesian Ministry of Education. Minister of Education and Culture Decree No. 56 of 2022 which contains the implementation of the independent curriculum, makes schools change the curriculum they use, so it is necessary to carry out research that can provide an overview of students' critical thinking skills which has been carried out by schools. This research aims to describe the critical thinking skills of State High School students in Makassar City in the Physics subject. This type of research is a quantitative descriptive survey method with the variables in this research, namely critical thinking skills which consist of three indicators, namely analysis, interpretation and inference. The instrument used in this research was a six-item essay form. The population of this research is all public high school students in Makassar City who are studying physics on Newton's laws of motion, namely students from SMAN 2 Makassar, SMAN 4 Makassar, SMAN 5 Makassar, SMAN 8 Makassar, and SMAN 16 Makassar. By using purposive sampling, the sample in this study was all students in one class in the five schools that made up the population. The results show that students' critical thinking skills in solving physics problems, namely 75.50% of the total student population, are in the low category. Where the indicators of ability to analyze, ability to interpret (interpretation) and ability to conclude (inference) are in the low category. Apart from that, the ratio of critical thinking skills of female students is higher than that of male students. It can be concluded that the critical thinking skills of high school students in the city of Makassar are still low.