ABSTRACT
This research was a needs assessment to develop learning sets for improving students’ Higher-Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) and self-confidence in junior high school. Higher-order thinking skills are a student’s ability to connect new information with information stored in their memory and to rearrange and/or extend this information to achieve a purpose or find a possible answer in a complicated situation. This ability includes deciding what to believe or what to do, creating a new idea, new object, or an artistic expression, making predictions, and solving non-routine problems. This research was descriptive research by means of a qualitative approach. Data was collected through observations, interviews, and focus group discussion, and the subjects were two university lectures, 18 university students, ten eighth-grade students and two mathematics teachers from the same junior high schools in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Data was analyzed qualitatively. The results of the study were as follows: first, students had difficulties in solving HOTS problems because they were unwilling to solve problems in long and complicated forms. They also did not have the self-confidence to solve such problems. Second, the problems that students are used to practicing are routine problems. Third, the lesson plans and student worksheets that teachers had were not HOTS-oriented. However, lesson plans and student worksheets are the kind of learning set that has the most important role in determining the orientation of a lesson. Based on these results, it is necessary to develop learning sets (lesson plans and student worksheets) to improve students’ HOTS and self-confidence that use a problem-solving approach, ideally in the cooperative setting of a group investigation.
