Arab Educational Information Network

This study aims at identifying the obstacles to developing the basic thinking skills among students in Islamic education courses in intermediate grades. To achieve this objective, the descriptive approach was adopted as a method for the study, and a questionnaire consisting of (49) items distributed to four sections was designed and applied to the study sample which amounts to (169) teachers and (40) supervisors. The most important findings are: There is an agreement among the participants that obstacles to the development of the basic thinking skills are moderately present. However, the theme of 'obstacles relating to the student, ranks first (to a great extent). The phrase "work load on the teacher does not help him in the creation of extracurricular activities" ranks first (to a great extent) among obstacles relating to the teacher, while the phrase "The students focus on memorizing the information in order to succeed" ranks first (to a great extent) among the obstacles associated with the student. The phrase "The evaluation in the textbook relies on testing the skill of memorization" ranks first (moderately) among the obstacles associated with the curriculum, whereas the phrase "Overcrowding of students in the classrooms" ranks first (to a great extent) among the obstacles relating to school. In addition, there are no statistically significant differences at the level of (α=0,05) between the means of the responses of teachers and supervisors on the sections of obstacles relating to the development of basic thinking skills. (Published abstract)