Critical Thinking Ability and Students’ Learning Achievement of Sociology Education in the Industrial Sociology Courses

This study aims to showed that the students’ learning achievements of Sociology Education were influenced by the critical thinking ability of students themselves; both were taught using Group Investigation (GI) and Direct Instruction Learning strategies. The participants of this study were Sociology Education students at one of the private universities in Indonesia. This research design used a treatment by level 2 x 2 design. In this design, the independent variable consisted of Group Investigation Learning strategy and Direct Instruction Learning strategy (A). The independent variable attribute was classified into 2, namely high critical thinking and low critical thinking (B). The research hypothesis was tested using analysis of variance (ANAVA) of two-way 2 x 2 and continued with the Dunnet t test. The results showed that the students’ learning achievement who had high critical thinking ability was better taught using Group Investigation (GI) learning strategy compared with Direct Instruction (DI) learning strategy. Therefore, the students’ learning achievement who had low critical thinking ability was better taught using Direct Instruction (DI) Learning strategy than taught using Group Investigation (GI) learning strategy. Keywords—critical thinking; learning achievement; sociology education