ASSESSING STUDENTS’ THINKING PERFORMANCE IN MALAY LANGUAGE LEARNINGS: A STUDY AT IMTIAZ SCHOOLS TERENGGANU, MALAYSIA

The transformation of Malaysia's 21st century education emphasizes on the agenda to develop students' thinking potential to produce generations capable of effectively addressing various challenges. In line with this, the religious schools have implemented a curriculum transformation with an integrated dual system namely the mainstream curriculum and the Quranic memorization (Hafazan) Program curriculum to produce knowledgeable students who are pious, appreciate and cultivate the Qur'anic teachings in life. The curriculum implemented hopefully be able to build the students' thinking potential whose Quranic knowledge will be integrated with the cognitive aspect towards enabling them to appreciate, evaluate and find solutions to the contemporary issues. This study analyzes the capability of student thinking levels in Malay language learning related to the language comprehension text test. Results show that the mastery and focus of the students' thinking as well as the skills to master each level of the question still need for improvements. Students' thinking performance is better for low-level questions whereas for high-level# questions, their level of failure in producing correct, accurate and desirable ideas in accordance with the requirements of the questioning task still needs to be improved. This is because their thinking capability does not reach the ability to appreciate knowledge and communicate them effectively even though the levels of the question being asked are within their thinking capacity. Thus, efforts to strengthen the capacity of students' thinking skills should be addressed to catalyze the transformation of the nation's education curriculum