Riana.Permatasari,, 2201408057 (2012) The Critical Thinking Tasks Displayed on the Textbooks for Eleventh Grade Students of Senior High School. Under Graduates thesis, Universitas Negeri Semarang.

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Abstract

This final project focuses on the analysis of critical thinking tasks in the textbooks for eleventh grade students of senior high school, especially reading tasks. Critical thinking is a skill of being able in making, analyzing, or evaluating an argument, judgment, definition, or classification by looking at an issue from many different points of view in order to get the correct decisions. This definition is the writer’s own definition which is shaped from philosophical and psychological point of view stated by some experts. Based on this definition the tasks which can foster the students’ critical thinking are the tasks which involve many cognitive aspects to find the answer of the tasks. This study is a descriptive qualitative research. The data in this research is in the form of tasks for reading skill taken from the textbooks for eleventh grade students of senior high school. The data which have been collected are analyzed using two frameworks of analysis, the Bloom’s taxonomy (1956) and the sequence of critical thinking tasks by Numrich (Beaumont, 2010). The Bloom’s taxonomy is used to reveal critical thinking in terms of taxonomy and the sequence of the critical thinking tasks by Numrich is used to uncover the structure of the tasks in the textbooks. The result of the analysis of critical thinking tasks using Bloom’s taxonomy shows that the reading tasks in the textbooks still focus on the understanding level which does not involve high critical thinking level. It is because the answers of the questions are clearly stated in the text. The result of analysis using the sequence of critical thinking tasks by Numrich shows that the reading tasks are dominantly structured by questions which focus on the text. It is because the reading tasks are written and designed for reading comprehension. These two analysis show that the focus of the task is still on the text, so that the students are not accostumed to think critically because they only do the tasks which their answers are clearly stated in the text. Based on the explanation above, I conclude that the reading tasks in the textbooks are not very appropriate to use in fostering students’ critical thinking. Whereas it is important to develop the students’ critical thinking skill because developing students’ critical thinking is one of goals of our educational system as stated by the Ministry of Education number 23 in 2006.

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