Abstract:

This study is about assessing some of the important skills of the 21st century that need to be possessed by current crops of students worldwide, scientific reasoning, scientific inquiry and inductive reasoning skills. Educational reforms stress the need for a prepared 21st-century workforce, where students need to acquire advanced transferable reasoning and inquiry skills. Research has shown that the development of these skills will better enable students to handle open-ended novel situations and solve scientific, engineering, and social problems in the real world. Inductive reasoning is one of the most studied general cognitive skills, as it is related to problem-solving, acquisition and application of knowledge in new contexts. Culture-free tasks, such as missing pieces of a puzzle, figural matrices, analogies are internationally preferred approaches to assess these skills. Few feedback mechanisms below grade 12 in Namibia, are in place to identify and assess these 21st century skills. The need to efficiently foster and assess the thinking and reasoning skills in the classroom context is imminent. The purposes of this study were to assess and investigate the relationship between scientific reasoning (SR), inductive reasoning (IR) and scientific inquiry (SI) skills in Namibia using paper and pencil method. The sample of the study was drawn from the tenth (N=130) and twelfth graders (N=452). The assessment tools for (SR) skills consisted of 24 items assessing the different type of reasoning skills, and IR test consisted of 38 items. The SI tests had 36 items assessing seven constructs of inquiry skills. Descriptive analysis and structural equation modelling (SEM) was used. The results showed that the Cronbach alphas were high, .90 α, .89 α and .93 α, for SR, IR and SI skills respectively. Overall mean results showed that some students performed above average, SR (M= 61.95; SD=26.58); IR (M=77.00; SD=17.00) and SI (M=72.65; SD=12.68). SEM was used to indicate the relationship between the three skills. The model fits were acceptable, χ2=278.13; df=101; CFI=.93; TLI=.92; RMSEA=.06 & SRMR=.06. Further analysis of the test scores showed that there was no gender significant differences in performance in these three tests, SR (t=.05, p >.05), SI (t=1.74. p >.05) and IR (t=.63, p >.05). In terms of age, no significant differences were found concerning SR (t=1.26, p > .05). However, grade 12 students performed significantly better than the grade 10 students in SI (t=5.19, p < .01) and in IR (t=8.72, p< .01). One-parameter Rasch analyses showed a good match between item difficulty and students’ ability level. The significant correlation was found between SI and IR (r=.35, p<.01), but no significant correlation was found between SR and the two-constructs assessed (p<.05). These results revealed that the paper and pencil assessment proved to be very reliable as all the three tests yielded very high internal consistency of Cronbach alpha >.87 in both age groups. Mean performance results indicated that no significant differences were found between genders in all the three tests as in line with the research community. The findings indicate that paper and pencil assessment methods is a good measure to assess these skills and may provide schools and teachers with assessment instruments to assess these kinds of skills regularly.

Keywords:

Assessment, reasoning skills, inquiry skills, paper-and-pencil method.