Articles

Teachers urged by Fatimah to cultivate 'thinking' students

Published by SchoolAdvisor | Oct 21, 2016

Minister of Welfare, Women and Community Wellbeing Datuk Fatimah Abdullah quips that quality education is one where children are taught to think.

This goal was further realised by revamping and improvemening the Primary School Standard Curriculum (KSSR) and Secondary School Standard Curriculum (KSSM).“Last year, about 20 per cent of the questions in UPSR papers were ‘higher order thinking’ ones. This year, the percentage was raised to 30 per cent.”Higher thinking skills were seen by many to be important in tackling current issues, she observed. However, to what extent to which higher-order-thinking skills were taught and assessed continued to be debated, with many teachers and employers are concerned that young people ‘cannot think’,” she said.“Brookhart (2010) identifies higher-order-thinking in terms of transfer, critical thinking, and problem solving. Brookhart argued that if teachers think of higher-order-thinking as problem solving, they can set lesson goals to teach students how to identify and solve problems at school and in life. “This involves not just solving problems set by the teachers but also solving new problems that they define themselves, creating something new as the solution,” she adds.