Balancing the act: Incorporating the constructive alignment in promoting and enhancing higher order thinking skills among the CHC learners

Abstract

Teaching students to become effective thinkers is increasingly recognised as an immediate goal of education. If students are to function successfully in a highly technical society, they must be equipped with lifelong thinking skills necessary to acquire and process information in an ever-changing world. To keep up with the pace of development; students must be taught how to think, instead of just how to answer examination questions. One of the issues that have been a discussion in the Malaysian Education forum is the overwhelming emphasis on exam grades, which in turn encourages students and teachers alike to get through the syllabus and memorised key points rather than taking the time to understand concepts. The education system that trained the Confucius Heritage Culture (CHC) learners to remember the facts and study by heart had wedged their perception of learning. This phenomena and the structured way of teaching in some way has reduced the process of developing their higher order thinking skills.This study is an extension of the study on the CHC’s learners enrolled in marketing subjects and their higher order thinking skills. In the previous study, a model of approaches to learning developed by Saljo, Biggs (1985), Marton and Entwistle (1984) were used to analyse the CHC learner’s development of higher order thinking skills. The learning components, teaching components and thinking components has been the major components in their learning process. Based on the previous findings, the study will incorporate the constructive alignment (Biggs, 2003) in the CHC learners learning and teaching process. Therefore, the objective of the study is to examine how the three main components influenced in the development of higher order thinking skills among the CHC learners and how the constructive alignment assisted in promoting and enhancing the higher order thinking skills.