Inculcation of Higher Order Thinking Skills in History Subject Using Multiple Intelligence Theory

Abstract

Higher-order thinking skills (HOTS) have become the focus of daily teaching and learning processes in response to the needs of current educational policies. Since 2013, history has been considered a mandatory subject for the Malaysia Certificate of Education (SPM). Therefore, the Ministry of Education of Malaysia (MoE) highly recommends History teachers to apply various teaching strategies that could attract students’ interest towards learning the subject. One of these is Howard Gardner's Multiple Intelligence Theory, which he proposed in 1983.Multiple Intelligence Theory is important due to its close relationship with the field of education. This study was meant to identify types of multiple intelligence applied by the History teachers to stimulate HOTS and to elaborate the teaching approaches that were simultaneously implemented with multiple intelligence to stimulate HOTS among students. During the instillation of HOTS in the History subject, a qualitative study was conducted to discover the sorts of multiple intelligences used and the teaching styles that complement the detected intelligence. Three Excellent History Teachers served as the test subjects. The information was gathered through a triangulation technique that included observation of the teaching and learning process, interviews, and document analysis. The ATLAS.ti 7.0 software was used to analyze and triangulate the data. The findings revealed that during the process of instilling HOTS in History, all informants mostly used verbal-linguistic, interpersonal, and visual-spatial intelligence. Excellent history teachers were also discovered complimenting other teaching methods such as conversation, questioning, and graphical presentation with the proper multiple intelligence in instilling HOTS in students.