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Thinking skills plays an important role in tertiary education. In the 21st century, students are required to master these skills so that they can deal with the various situations that they come across in the university and later at the workplace. This paper analyses students report writing based on a given set of data written in exam conditions to investigate their reasoning skills especially analyses and synthesis which are the 2 highest levels in the Bloom’s Taxonomy cognitive domain. A total of 30 humanities and 30 science students’ reports were analysed using the Malaysian University English Test (MUET) marking scheme. The preliminary findings indicate that good writers managed to demonstrate analysing and synthesising in their writing while the weak ones failed to integrate both the skills to a certain extent. On one hand, the middle-graded writers could only manage to show one of the skills. The science students managed to incorporate both skills at a better level as compared to the humanities students as they are more exposed to logical thinking in their major courses. For pedagogical intervention, it is suggested that HOT writing lessons must facilitate students’ writing ability and interest and should be clearly instilled in the teaching and learning of writing activities in ESL writing classrooms. Students also need to be taught explicitly how to use the HOTS (higher-order thinking skills) not only in the language course but in all other courses in the university.
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In-Text Citation: (Mello et al., 2021)
To Cite this Article: Mello, G. D. J. P. De, Omar, N. H., Esa, I. I. M., & Ariffin, K. (2021). An Analysis of Higher-Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) in Malaysian University English Test Report Writing. International Journal of Academic Research in Business and Social Sciences, 11(4), 1384–1394.
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