The effect of chemistry learning based on differentiated science inquiry to improve students' critical thinking

Abstract

The 2013 Curriculum applied in the school still faces difficulties in improving students' critical thinking skills. Teachers did not pay attention to students' initial ability in drawing up the lesson plan because they drew it up just to fulfil the administrative obligations. It does not accommodate all students with different initial abilities to improve their critical thinking skills by giving them equal opportunities. Differentiated science inquiry is a gradual learning model of inquiry lessons that carry out four levels of inquiry, namely demonstrated, structured, guided, and self-directed inquiry into the learning process and adapted to the needs of students. Learning materials based on the differentiated science inquiry model have been developed, so this study aims to determine whether there is an effect of chemistry learning based on the differentiated science inquiry model to improve students' critical thinking. According to descriptive analysis, the N-Gain of the control class is 0.613 with the medium category, while the experiment class got 0,783 with the high category. The N-Gain analysis of students' critical thinking in each stage is in the high category where students of demonstrated, structured, guided, and self-directed inquiry got N-Gain as much as 0.737, 0.754, 0.801, 0.844. Students are very critical category for elementary clarification indicators, critical category for basic support, strategy and tactics, and advanced clarification indicators, and quite critical category for inference indicators. According to the inferential analysis, the data was not normal and homogeny distributed. The hypothesis was tested by Mann Whitney and showed that the significance is 0.00 < 0.05, which means that chemistry learning based on the DSI model has an effect on improving students' critical thinking.