CONTEXTUAL LEARNING APPROACH IN IMPROVING CRITICAL THINKING SKILLS OF GUIDANCE AND COUNSELING STUDENTS OF STATE UNIVERSITY OF MEDAN

This study is aimed at finding out the effectiveness of Contextual Teaching Approach on students’ critical thinking.Theories of critical thinking and of contextual teaching are referred to so as to support this study. The research applied the Classroom Action Research design. The data were collected from 36 students of Guidance and Counseling of State University of Medan by using the Scale of Critical Thinking Ability through the implementation of Contextual Teaching Approach. The data were quantitatively analyzed. During the pre-test number of the students who already exhibited critical thinking skills were 4 (11%), and the rest, or as many as 32 students (89%), were still below the level. The average score for the whole class was 67.At the end of the first cycle, 17 students (47%) successfully showed good performance whereas 19 other students (52.7%) did not improve much. The class’ average score increased to 74.2. In the second cycle, the number of students who were able to think critically significantly increased up to 34 (94%), and the other 2 (5%) still failed to achieve the target. The average score was 80.4. It could then be concluded that Contextual Teaching Approach has an effect on critical thinking skills among the students of Guidance and Counseling.