Obstacles to the Employment of Selected Productive Thinking Skills in Science Teaching at the Intermediate School Level in Tabuk City from Teachers' Perspectives

Abstract

The study aimed to investigate the degree of obstacles to employing some productive thinking skills in teaching science from the perspective of middle school science teachers in the city of Tabuk. The researcher adopted the descriptive approach. To collect data, a questionnaire consisting of (50) items distributed across (5) skills, with (10) items under each skill, was developed and administered to a sample of (60) science teachers. The results indicated that the degree of the existence of obstacles to employing some productive thinking skills, from the perspective of middle school science teachers, was “very high.” The obstacles related to the skills of originality, fluency, flexibility, and inference obtained a mean score of (4.4) and a percentage of (%88), whereas the obstacles related to the interpretation skill had a mean of (4.5) and a percentage of (%90).The study also revealed that there were no statistically significant differences at the (0.05) level between the mean responses of the teachers regarding the obstacles to employing some productive thinking skills attributable to the variables of academic qualification and years of experience. The study recommended the necessity of finding solutions to overcome the obstacles to employing productive thinking skills in teaching among middle school science teachers.