Inquiry learning with a STEM approach to increase critical thinking skills in terms of students’ initial abilities

Critical thinking skills are abilities that a person should has in the modern era. Students who learn Chemistry practice their critical thinking skills to make decisions, pose a reasoning to solve a problem by collecting information, making hypotheses, and analyzing data. The aim of this research is to describe the effect of inquiry with STEM to critical thinking skill on learn chemistry. This research design using a quasi-experimental design that is a 2x2 factorial experiment. Subject of this research involve 63 high school students that divided to two classes. Critical thinking skills measured by research instruments in the form of 5 test items. Each class is divided into two groups namely groups with low and high initial abilities. The result was analyzed by statistical analysis using two ways ANOVA. The hypothesis tested with significance value 5% or α = 0.05. The result is there are differences in critical thinking skills of students with different initial abilities in the class being taught with or without STEM where mean of experiment class is 81,25 greater than control class (mean = 78,87). This research show that using inquiry learning with STEM could increase the critical thinking skill students to learn chemistry.