Critical Thinking Skills in a Secondary School Pakistan Studies Textbook: A Qualitative Content Analysis

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to examine the critical thinking skills incorporated in text-based questions and tasks in the Pakistan Studies textbooks of secondary level. The Pakistan Studies textbook produced by the Punjab Textbook Board for ninth was analyzed using qualitative content analysis based on cognitive domains derived from six levels of revised Bloom's taxonomy. Moreover, the text-based questions were then analyzed by categorizing them under the nine pre-determined analytic categories of Socratic taxonomy. These categories depicted the questions that challenge the critical thinking skills of learners. The findings revealed that the text-based question incorporated in the selected textbook of Pakistan Studies was not conducive to developing critical thinking skills among students. Except for one question, none of the questions fell under higher-order thinking levels of revised Bloom's taxonomy. Furthermore, based on analytic categories, text-based questions showed a little inclination towards the questions of clarification, whereas none represented other categories. Therefore, textbook developers need to focus on the induction of critical thinking skills in the text-based questions and tasks of textbooks.