Improving Secondary School Students Critical Thinking Skills in The Production of Visual Artworks through the Ard Critical Thinking Taxonomy

Critical thinking skills are important to students' creativity in the production of visual artworks. Past studies have not delved deep into the role of these skills among students. Past findings also revealed that the level of critical thinking skills among the Visual Art Education (VAE) teachers are far from satisfactory. In fact, there is no specific guide for adopting the critical production process that can be referred to by VAE teachers and curriculum designers. Therefore, this study aims to identify the influence of critical thinking on students' creativity in the process of producing visual artworks. This study also aims to evaluate the ARD Critical Thinking Taxonomy (or known as Taksonomi Pemikiran Kritis ARD) that has been developed for teacher to use as a guide by VAE teachers. The Design and Development method has been employed with the inclusion of the Requirements Analysis, Design and Development, and Evaluation phases. Findings reveal that all ARD TPK constructs reach expert consensus in addition to successfully determining the ranking of critical thinking according to priority, starting with Routine Thinking, Advanced Thinking, Conceptual Thinking and Strategic Thinking. The findings of this study also display that ARD TPK is capable of increasing students critical thinking especially creativity. The findings also suggest that the ARD TPK is very vital to all parties, especially the Malaysian Ministry of Education (MOE) in emphasising the development of the individual's potential in an integrated and comprehensive manner in line with the Malaysian Philosophy of Education.