Critical Thinking Tasks Manifested in Indonesian Language Textbooks for Senior Secondary Students

Abstract

This study aims to investigate to what extent critical thinking is manifested in the Indonesian language textbooks used by senior high school students in Indonesia. Content analysis has been adopted to determine whether the tasks in the textbooks encourage and promote students’ critical thinking skills. Ilyas’s critical thinking framework, which was the result of evaluating, examining, and synthesizing 21 critical thinking programs, strategies, tests, and taxonomies, was used for the analytic categories. The findings showed that the textbooks did not contain many tasks promoting critical thinking. Besides this, tasks potentially encouraging students’ critical thinking were not varied. The findings suggest that as critical thinking has been included as one of the education objectives in this country, textbook writers need to create more tasks promoting critical thinking; moreover, Indonesian language teachers need to be taught how to modify tasks that can promote critical thinking skills among students.