Organizing biology learning through Vee-diagrams to improve higher-order thinking skills

This study aims to describe how Vee diagrams can organize biology learning and improve students' Higher-Order Thinking Skills, which are metacognition and critical thinking. The researcher used a pre-experimental method with one group pre-test post-test design. The sample consisted of 37 eleventh-grade students who had been randomly selected. The data were gathered using 20 open-ended description questions to reveal student's metacognition and critical thinking. Furthermore, the data were analyzed statistically using N-gain and parametric test of paired sample t-test. The researchers also analyzed student research design and reported to reveal how Vee diagrams can organize students learning. The result shows that the mean of N-gain of metacognition was at the high category (0,81) and the critical thinking was at the medium category (0,68). The analysis showed that the focus question was the key to organize learning and improve students' Higher-Order Thinking Skills. The Event and Object aspect can lead students to improve their metacognition and critical thinking skills, especially for planning, conditional knowledge, debugging strategy, basic support, tactic and strategy, and information management strategy. Besides, this study also revealed that transformation activities and guiding students with transformed data questions could help them develop procedural knowledge, declarative knowledge, monitoring comprehension, evaluation, inference, elementary clarification, and advance clarification.