The Level of Marzano Higher Order Thinking Skills among Technical Education Students

Higher order thinking skills is an important aspect in teaching and learning especially at higher education institutions. Thinking skills practices are part of the generic skills that should be infused in all technical subjects. Students with higher order thinking skills are able to learn, improve their performance and reduce their weaknesses. Hence, the purpose of this research was to identify the level of Marzano Higher Order Thinking Skills among technical education students in the Faculty of Technical Education (FPTek), Universiti Tun Hussein Onn Malaysia. A total of 158 students of FPTek were randomly selected as sample. A set of questionnaires adapted from Marzano Rubrics for Specific Task or Situations (1993) was used as research instrument. This is a quantitative research and the gathered data was analyzed using Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS) software. The findings indicated that students perceived they have moderate level for investigation, experimental inquiry, comparing, deducing, constructing support, inducing and invention. However, decision making, problem solving, error analyzing, abstracting, analyzing perspectives and classifying are at low level. The Eta analysis indicated that there is a very low positive relationship between the level of Marzano Higher Order Thinking Skills and gender, academic achivement as well as socio economic status. Besides that, the findings also showed that there is no statistically significant difference in gender, academic achivement and socio economic status on the level of Marzano Higher Order Thinking Skills. However, there is significant difference in socio economic status on the level of decision making.