📄 social_science

Self Reported Practical Innovation and Its Associations with Critical Thinking Problem Solving and Teamwork among Indonesian Biology Undergraduates

This study of Indonesian biology undergraduates reveals that self-reported practical innovation is strongly associated with critical thinking and teamwork but not with problem solving, highlighting the importance of distinguishing these constructs and using validated individual scores rather than a single unvalidated Higher-Order Thinking Skills total.

Original authors: Luthpi Safahi, Gunawan Suryoputro, Samsul Maarif, Zulherman Zulherman

Published 2026-09-29

📖 5 min read🧠 Deep dive

CC BY 4.0

Original authors: Luthpi Safahi, Gunawan Suryoputro, Samsul Maarif, Zulherman Zulherman

Original paper licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). ✨ This is an AI-generated explanation of the paper below. It is not written or endorsed by the authors. For technical accuracy, refer to the original paper. Read full disclaimer

In the modern classroom, educators are increasingly focused on skills that go beyond simply memorizing facts. They want students to learn how to think critically, solve complex problems, work effectively in groups, and come up with new, practical ideas. In the field of biology, where students must connect microscopic processes to large environmental systems, these abilities are essential. Researchers call these abilities "higher-order thinking skills." However, measuring them is tricky. Often, schools and studies combine these different skills into a single score, as if they were all the same thing. This approach can hide the fact that a student might be excellent at working with others but struggle with solving specific problems, or vice versa. Understanding how these skills actually relate to one another in real students is crucial for designing better lessons and assessments.

A team of researchers at Universitas Muhammadiyah Prof Dr Hamka in Indonesia recently investigated how these skills overlap among biology undergraduates. They were particularly interested in a specific ability they called "practical innovation," which is the capacity to take biological knowledge and turn it into a workable solution or improvement. To understand this, they looked at how students rated their own abilities in four areas: critical thinking, problem solving, teamwork, and practical innovation. The study involved 100 biology students who completed a detailed questionnaire containing 113 questions about their experiences with biology concepts, laboratory experiments, and group projects. The researchers wanted to see if students who felt confident in one area also felt confident in the others, and whether these feelings of confidence actually moved together as a single package or as distinct traits.

The researchers began by carefully checking how the students answered the questions. They noticed that some of the questions about problem solving were phrased negatively, describing bad habits like losing patience or avoiding difficult tasks. To make sure the scores made sense, the team flipped the scoring for these specific questions so that a higher number always meant better problem-solving skills. This small adjustment turned out to be very important. Before this correction, the data suggested that problem solving was strongly linked to practical innovation. After the correction, that strong link weakened to a moderate level. The students who rated themselves highly on practical innovation were indeed the same students who rated themselves highly on teamwork and critical thinking, but their self-rated problem-solving skills did not follow the same pattern.

When the researchers looked at the numbers, they found that teamwork was the skill students felt most confident about, followed closely by practical innovation and critical thinking. Problem solving was rated lower than the others. The students who felt they were good at working in teams were also the ones who felt they could come up with innovative biology solutions. Similarly, those who felt they were good at critical thinking also felt strong in practical innovation. These two skills, teamwork and critical thinking, were so closely tied to practical innovation that they explained 85% of the variation in how students rated their own innovative abilities. However, once the researchers accounted for teamwork and critical thinking, the students' self-rated problem solving added only a negligible amount of unique value to the picture. It was as if the ability to innovate was already largely described by how well a student felt they could think critically and work with others.

The study also revealed that the way the questions were written mattered immensely. The set of questions about problem solving was less consistent than the others. Even after fixing the scoring direction, the answers to these questions did not hang together as tightly as the answers for teamwork or critical thinking. This suggests that the problem-solving questions might be measuring a mix of different things, perhaps combining rational strategies with emotional reactions like frustration or avoidance. Because of this, the researchers concluded that it is misleading to lump all these skills together into one big "higher-order thinking" score. Instead, they argued that educators and researchers should look at each skill separately.

This research highlights a key lesson for how we measure student abilities. The study did not prove that teamwork causes innovation, nor did it show that these students are actually better at solving real-world problems than others. It only showed how these students perceived their own skills and how those perceptions were connected. The findings suggest that when students feel they are good at collaborating and thinking critically, they also tend to feel capable of creating practical innovations. But their feelings about their problem-solving skills seem to be a separate story, one that is more complex and less uniform. The researchers emphasized that future studies need to look at actual performance, not just self-reported feelings, and that we must be careful not to treat different skills as if they are identical just because they often appear together. By keeping these skills distinct, educators can better understand where students need help and how to foster the specific abilities required for the future of science.

Technical Summary: Self-Reported Practical Innovation and Its Associations with Critical Thinking, Problem Solving, and Teamwork among Indonesian Biology Undergraduates

Problem Statement
Higher-order thinking skills (HOTS) and collaborative competencies are frequently aggregated into single composite scores in educational assessment. This practice risks obscuring distinct measurement patterns and associations among specific domains such as critical thinking, problem solving, teamwork, and practical innovation. Furthermore, assessment research often reports reliability without rigorously examining scoring polarity (directionality) or the structural coherence of item sets. In the context of biology education, where students must navigate complex systems and evidence-based reasoning, there is a need to distinguish whether self-reported scores in these domains represent a single latent trait or distinct, concurrently related competencies. A specific gap exists in understanding the empirical relations of "practical innovation" with other HOTS domains within a unified, biology-contextualized self-report instrument, particularly when accounting for potential scoring artifacts.

Methodology
This study employed an exploratory, cross-sectional secondary analysis of 100 biology undergraduates from various public and private institutions in Indonesia. The data source was a structured online questionnaire containing 113 Likert-type items (1–5 scale) contextualized to biology (e.g., laboratory experiments, ecological consequences, biological data). The instrument comprised four domains:

Critical Thinking: 40 items (CT1–CT40)
Problem Solving: 21 items (PSS1–PSS21)
Teamwork: 26 items (TS1–TS26)
Practical Innovation: 26 items (PIS1–PIS26)

Key Analytical Procedures:

Scoring Sensitivity: A critical methodological step involved the reverse-scoring of items PSS14–PSS21. These items described maladaptive emotional and avoidant responses (e.g., anger, withdrawal). They were reverse-scored at the respondent level ( $6 - \text{response}$ ) to ensure that higher values consistently indicated more effective problem solving.
Descriptive and Reliability Diagnostics: The study calculated mean item scores, standard deviations, and confidence intervals. Internal consistency was assessed using Cronbach's alpha and one-factor McDonald's omega, alongside mean inter-item correlations and corrected item-rest correlations.
Associative Modeling: Pearson and Spearman correlations were computed among the four domain means. A multiple linear regression model was constructed with Practical Innovation as the dependent variable and Critical Thinking, Problem Solving, and Teamwork as simultaneous predictors.
Robustness Checks: The regression analysis utilized HC3 heteroscedasticity-robust standard errors to handle potential variance issues in the modest sample size ( $N=100$ ). Model diagnostics included residual inspection, the Breusch–Pagan test, and the Ramsey RESET test. Sensitivity analyses were performed by excluding five respondents who provided uniform responses across all items.

Key Results

Score Distributions: Teamwork had the highest mean score ( $M=3.898$ ), followed by Practical Innovation ( $M=3.811$ ), Critical Thinking ( $M=3.799$ ), and Problem Solving ( $M=3.495$ ).
Internal Consistency: Critical Thinking, Teamwork, and Practical Innovation demonstrated very high internal consistency ( $\alpha$ and $\omega$ ranging from .967 to .973). In contrast, the Problem Solving scale showed lower and less coherent consistency after reverse-scoring ( $\alpha = .815$ , $\omega = .727$ ), with mean inter-item correlations dropping to .190.
Impact of Scoring Direction: Reverse-scoring the Problem Solving items materially altered the results. Under raw scoring, Problem Solving correlated strongly with Practical Innovation ( $r = .614$ ) and had a significant positive regression coefficient ( $\beta = .128, p = .014$ ). After reverse-scoring, the correlation weakened ( $r = .468$ ), and the unique regression coefficient became non-significant and negative ( $\beta = -.048, p = .269$ ).
Associations with Practical Innovation:
- Zero-order correlations: Practical Innovation was strongly correlated with Teamwork ( $r = .879$ ) and Critical Thinking ( $r = .863$ ), and moderately with Problem Solving ( $r = .468$ ).
- Regression Model: In the HC3-robust three-predictor model, Teamwork ( $\beta = .550, p < .001$ ) and Critical Thinking ( $\beta = .450, p < .001$ ) retained significant positive associations with Practical Innovation. Problem Solving did not retain a unique association ( $\beta = -.048, p = .269$ ).
- Model Fit: The full model explained 85.0% of the variance in Practical Innovation ( $R^2 = .850$ ).

Key Contributions

Methodological Rigor in Scoring: The study demonstrates that scoring direction (polarity) is not a minor technicality but a substantive factor that can reverse or nullify statistical conclusions. The failure to reverse-score maladaptive items would have led to an erroneous conclusion that problem solving is a unique predictor of practical innovation.
Construct-Level Reporting: The analysis argues against aggregating these domains into a single "HOTS" total score. The domains exhibit different psychometric properties (e.g., the heterogeneity of the problem-solving scale) and distinct association patterns, suggesting they should be reported separately.
Differentiation of Competencies: The findings clarify that while self-reported practical innovation co-occurs strongly with teamwork and critical thinking in this sample, it does not share a unique linear association with the specific problem-solving scale used once directionality is corrected.
Transparency in Secondary Analysis: The paper provides a transparent audit of an archived dataset, explicitly reporting item-level diagnostics, sensitivity analyses regarding scoring rules, and the limitations of self-report data.

Significance and Claims
The paper positions its contribution as diagnostic and relational rather than a claim of instrument validation or causal mechanism.

Nature of Findings: The results describe concurrent associations among self-reported scores within a specific voluntary sample. The authors explicitly state that these findings do not demonstrate causal influence, proven competence, or a validated higher-order latent structure.
Educational Implication: The study suggests that assessment practices should avoid collapsing heterogeneous competencies into a single score. Instead, construct-level reporting is preferable to preserve information about specific strengths (e.g., teamwork) and weaknesses (e.g., the structural coherence of problem-solving items).
Limitations Acknowledged: The authors note that the cross-sectional design, modest sample size, lack of measurement invariance testing, and reliance on self-report (which may be influenced by shared method variance) limit the generalizability of the findings. The high $R^2$ is attributed to the concurrent measurement of related self-perceptions rather than explanatory power.
Future Direction: The paper calls for future research to validate the factor structure in larger samples, establish measurement invariance, and link self-report scores to authentic performance criteria (e.g., actual experimental design or innovation products) rather than relying solely on self-perception.

Technical Summary: Self-Reported Practical Innovation and Its Associations with Critical Thinking, Problem Solving, and Teamwork among Indonesian Biology Undergraduates

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