Abstract—Teachers must possess critical thinking skills to
become good facilitators in the education process to produce
students with high-order thinking skills. This research aims to
evaluate the implementation of the inquiry-based learning (IBL)
method in improving the critical thinking (CT) skills of
prospective teachers with their own learning styles. An
experimental study is the research method used in this research
with the matching-only pretest–posttest with a control group
design. The selected participants consisted of two groups of
prospective teachers, a total of 76 people with low critical
thinking skills and 50 people with very low skills. The
experimental group was given the IBL method, while the
control group was given the problem-based learning method,
which refers to the latest curriculum. Treatment is given for 8
weeks. The statistical analysis used includes Wilcoxon,
Mann–Whitney, and Kruskal–Wallis followed by post hoc. The
results of this study show an increase in critical thinking in both
the experimental group and the control group. However, the
increase in the experimental group was significantly higher
than the control group. The increase in experimental group
with low and very low CT group did not differ significantly. On
the other hand, in the control group, the increase in CT in the
low group was significantly higher than the very low group.
Furthermore, the Kruskal–Wallis difference test in the
experimental group based on learning styles showed that
prospective teachers with converging learning styles were more
able to follow the IBL method compared to other learning
styles.
Index Terms—Inquiry-based learning, critical thinking,
prospective teachers, learning style.
The authors are with Universitas Negeri Malang, Indonesia (e-mail:
damajantikusuma@unesa.ac.id, wayanardhanaunm@gmail.com,
ir_ta_dji@yahoo.com, tututchusniyah@gmail.com) and UIN Sunan Gunung
Djati, Indonesia (e-mail: ambarsulianti@uinsgd.ac.id).
Cite: Damajanti Kusuma Dewi, Wayan Ardhana, Irtadji, Tutut Chusniyah, and Ambar Sulianti, "Inquiry-Based Learning Implementation to Improve Critical Thinking of Prospective Teachers," International Journal of Information and Education Technology vol. 11, no. 12, pp. 638-645, 2021.
Copyright © 2021 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited (CC BY 4.0).