Critical Thinking Skills of Prospective Biology Teachers: A Preliminary Analysis

Having critical-thinking skills and characters is one of the competencies that must be possessed by prospective biology teachers. Every student in the biology class must have critical-thinking skills to be able to analyze, evaluate, and overcome problems in daily life. For this reason, the preparation is needed to empower essential skills of thinking of biology education students as prospective biology teachers, one of which is to explore the fundamental skills of critical thinking. This study aims to describe the initial critical-thinking skills of prospective biology teachers - the survey conducted on 109 students of the Biology Education study program at Universitas Negeri Padang. The instrument used was a critical thinking test consisting of 50 multiple-choice questions that refer to Watson Laser Critical-Thinking Appraisal (WGCTA). The data were analyzed using descriptive statistics. The results showed that the average critical- thinking skills of prospective biology teachers was 60.47 with a moderate category. The ability of deductive reasoning has the highest average score (M = 74.58, SD = 13.71) and the ability to make inference has the lowest average score (M = 32.56, SD = 14.36). Therefore, efforts were made to overcome the lack of critical thinking skills. An effort that could be done was to train students in solving problems through integrated cultural problem-based learning.