Unlocking Spatial Wisdom: A Polya-Inspired Approach to Strengthening Year 5 Students' Higher-Order Thinking Skills

The development of higher-order thinking skills (HOTS) is central to educational objectives. There are few instruments to cultivate students' HOTS, and an instrument based on the Polya problem-solving strategy was designed. This study assessed the HOTS among 23 students in a spatial field in Johor Bahru, Malaysia. Utilising the content from Chapter 6 of the current Malaysian school curriculum textbook for Year 5, which is based on the Kurikulum Standard Sekolah Menengah(KSSM), this research employs a detailed scoring rubric to evaluate the quality of student responses and their adherence to the Polya problem-solving strategy across a series of spatial tasks. The results indicate a varied performance level, with some students demonstrating excellent problem-solving abilities, while others showed room for improvement. A significant decline in student performance occurs as task complexity increases, particularly in the design and steps of problem-solving. Only two out of 23 students met the requirements of HOTS, emphasising the necessity of differentiated teaching strategies. The study also examined the impact of gender on these skills and found no substantial effect. When examining the effect of different ethnic groups on students’ HOTS scores, it was found that the Malay-Chinese group had the highest mean ranking (14.00), followed by the Malay group (12.39), while the Indian group had the lowest mean ranking (10.50). Although there were some differences in rankings between different ethnic groups, such differences were not large enough to be statistically significant, and the sample should be expanded. This study recommends an instrument to strengthen HOTS and provides a replicable framework for future spatial reasoning research.