Thirteenth International Conference on Interdisciplinary Social Sciences

Abstract

Data were collected through document analysis and semi-structured interviews with twelve science heads of departments (HODs) and senior teachers, who are experienced in teaching high school physical sciences. The documents that were analysed are past question papers and teachers’ notes used for teaching and assessing learners. The Revised Bloom’s taxonomy (Anderson and Krathwohl, 2001) was used as a conceptual framework in analysing the collected data. The interviews were recorded, transcribed, anonymized, and coded for themes. The findings highlighted diversity among the teachers in four areas: their own understanding of the concept of higher-order thinking, practical utilization of instructional strategies related to modelling and fostering higher order thinking in the classroom, beliefs about students’ abilities to acquire higher-order thinking skills, and self-perception regarding teaching towards higher-order thinking. It was found that in general the teachers understand what higher-order thinking skills are. Their daily preparation documents revealed that they do plan for modelling higher-order thinking. However, in actual fact, they treated difficult class exercises or tasks as being a higher-order thinking exercise. Assessments and tests conducted were mainly content driven and did not test for any higher-order thinking. Most teachers seldom model higher-order thinking abilities among their students. Only a minority of teachers see modelling of higher-order thinking as an important objective of teaching physical sciences. In summary, teachers are uncertain about the whole issue of modelling higher-order thinking in schools.