Profile of Students' Critical and Creative Thinking Skills on Virus Material: The Need for Learning Innovation

This research intends to describe a preliminary study of students' critical and creative thinking skill profiles at one of the State High Schools in Madiun, East Java, as well as their empowerment efforts. The type of research carried out was quantitative descriptive. The research population was students who had received virus material. This study's data collection used questionnaires and essay questions adjusted to the sub-indicators of critical and creative thinking skills. The findings indicated that 86.4% of pupils encountered difficulties comprehending virus-related content. The learning method that is often used is the conventional method, the learning resources that were often used were textbooks and PowerPoint as a frequently used learning medium. The correlation between the biology textbook used with critical thinking indicators is only 27.78% and 28.13% for creative thinking indicators. The profile of students' critical thinking skills obtained results of 32.23% (Interpretation), 28.97% (Analysis), 30.08% (Inference), 24.16% (Evaluation), 33.56% (Explanation), and 34.29% (Self-regulation). The profile of students' creative thinking skills obtained results of 37.07% (Fluency), 30.83% (Flexibility), 35.68% (Originality), and 27.96% (Elaboration). The conclusion is that students' critical and creative thinking skills are relatively low, so innovative learning is needed to empower these skills