A Combined HOTS-Based Assessment/STEM Learning Model to Improve Secondary Students’ Thinking Skills: A Development and Evaluation Study

An integrated STEM education has been used for a long time to improve Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) of students. This skills covered the capability to analyze, evaluate, and create which can be enhanced by implementing a right learning model, materials, and assessment. This study aims to develop and evaluate a combined HOTS-based assessment/STEM learning model to improve the students’ thinking skills. A proposed model was designed by following the seven steps of Borg Gall research and development. The impact of this model was evaluated by analyzing the average gain of pretest-posttest and Tukey signification difference test compared to a conventional STEM model. The result showed a significant difference between two treatments (t-value = 4.63; p 0.001). It also conform a better improvements of students’ thinking skills by our model based on the analysis of gain score distribution. Keywords: STEM learning model, HOTS-based assessment, research and development, secondary students