Assessment of Essential Thinking Skills in AT the Crossroads Textbook: An Evaluation

Abstract

This study attempts to assess essential thinking skills in the section called ‘Check Your Progress’ that is mentioned at the end of each unit in At the Crossroads textbook which is designed for first year secondary education students. This section is destined to students’ selfevaluation at the end of each unit through a series of exercises. This research is conducted under the light of Barbara Presseisen’s taxonomy (1991) of essential thinking skills. As concerns data collection, it involves a sample of fifty seven exercises distributed over five assessment sections within the textbook. In order to analyze our corpus, we have opted for the use of the mixed method that helped us to qualify and quantify the gathered data that we reformulated later with charts and tables to clarify how these skills are classified within this section. The findings show that Presseisen’s taxonomy is encouraged by ‘Check Your Progress’ exercises but the thinking skills categories are not equally emphasized. Indeed, we found that Transformations skill is the one which is more highlighted, then come respectively Qualification, Relationships, Causation and Classification skills. After that, we attempted to connect this taxonomy to the constructivism approach, as it is the one which the textbook is based on, to find out that Presseisen’s essential thinking skills accord the principles of the constructivist view about learning