Index

Abstract

The current study aimed to investigate the assessment of creative thinking skills as a part of the evaluation questions set in the well-developed Islamic Education curricula of the first intermediate grade in Kingdom of Saudi Arabia during the academic year 2020-21. To achieve this goal, an analysis card was prepared for analyzing these questions as a tool in the targeted curricula, namely Tawhid, Hadith, Tafseer and Fiqh by ensuring psychometric properties. The analysis card included 29 sub-skills, distributed into four main areas of creative thinking: fluency, flexibility, originality and the use of details and elaboration. The findings of the study showed low inclusion rates of creative thinking skills in the evaluation question content in the targeted curricula. In light of these findings, the study recommends educational decision-makers and those in charge of planning, preparing, evaluating and developing Islamic education curricula to reconsider the assessment questions of lessons and study units in terms of creative thinking skills. It is essential to review the process of designing and preparing more knowledge-based content and set related evaluation questions, subject to accurate and purposeful scientific methodology.

Keywords: Content of evaluation questions, Creative thinking skills, Descriptive analytical approach, Curriculum , Evaluation questions, Islamic education, Teaching methods.

Received: 9 April 2021 / Revised: 11 May 2021 / Accepted: 4 June 2021/ Published: 30 June 2021

Contribution/ Originality

This study is one of very few studies which have investigated the assessment of creative thinking skills and their inclusion in the evaluation questions of Islamic Education curricula in Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The study used new estimation methodology based on an analysis card prepared by the author as a study instrument.


1. INTRODUCTION

Based on qualitative leaps of the great and rapid changes in all areas of life witnessed in our age, especially the cognitive ones, a need has arisen for qualitatively improving the learning and teaching process and providing students with thinking patterns to help them face the challenges vested in accumulation of knowledge, in the requirements of life, and life’s contemporary problems as well. This would enable students to produce, criticize and scrutinize knowledge gained.

In the field of education, recent trends have called for the importance of evaluation questions that can determine students’ strengths, weaknesses and academic achievement. To achieve the goals of education, including the development and stimulation of all reasoning types, many researchers advocate the importance of developing and diversifying evaluation questions pertaining to all levels of knowledge in the curricula (Adas, 2000; Al-Jallad, 2001; Hamadeen, 2003). In the light of the above, school curricula have received great attention from authors and academicians regarding evaluation questions. Many have investigated how the planning, construction and development of the curricula are influenced and anticipated their impact on the content of evaluation questions, which may be subject to modification, change, deletion or addition (Ambo-Saeedi & Al-Afifi, 2004). Therefore, the prescribed books are one of the most important pillars for achieving the curricula’ desired goals. They receive a large share of interest from educators and decision-makers through analysis, evaluation and development.

Creative thinking has appeared as a thinking skill with a prominent place at the top of the hierarchy of the modern educational system’s priorities. Its innovative and imaginative characteristics expose the learner to new and unfamiliar horizons. Creative thinking is also one of the most important thinking skills, leading to mental liberation and cognitive enrichment based on advanced mental processes. It is represented by unusual solutions, ideas and behaviours, and it increases the individual’s awareness of himself and those around him through an awareness of the new and old relationships between things and skills to predict the outcomes of those relationships. These creative skills enable individuals to face the external life positively and ably (Lin, 2004).

2. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK AND PREVIOUS STUDIES

The educational literature includes many definitions that deal with the interpretation and clarification of the creative thinking concept, which are varied according to multiplicity of purposes and specializations. Wang (2012) refers to creative thinking as a mental process in which the learner interacts with their experiences with a view to understanding the elements of a situation and reaching a new understanding or original solution that serves the learner or his/her community. In the same context, Jarwan (2007) refers to creative thinking as a complex and purposeful mental activity directed by a strong desire to search for solutions or to reach original products that were not known before. This type of creative thinking is characterized by comprehensiveness and complexity because it involves overlapping cognitive, emotional and ethical elements, forming a unique state of mind.

Eragamreddy (2013) described creative thinking as the individual’s ability to produce. This ability is characterized by the greatest intellectual fluency, flexibility and originality. It has far-reaching implications, such as the individual’s response to a problem or an exciting situation. It is thinking beyond what is familiar or clear, resulting in good ideas or solutions that lead to good production.

Habash (2002) referred to creative thinking as the method used by the individual to produce the largest number of ideas about the problem being faced (intellectual fluency). These ideas are characterized by flexibility and non-repetition of originality.

The role of creative thinking is thus clear from these concepts that are helpful in the formation of new structures and planning to create new, original and valuable knowledge. The process of creativity is an advanced mental phenomenon through which an individual deals with situations, experiences and problems in a unique or unfamiliar way. It may involve developing a previous set of solutions and coming up with a new solution.

(Sternberg & Lubart, 1999; Watson & Glaser, 1980) think that the creative process passes through the following four stages: the preparation stage for a strange creative idea; the incubation stage, which includes the maturation of the idea from theory to solution; the stage of illumination, which leads to the realization of the idea; and the verification stage, which involves reaching the original beneficial and satisfactory results.

Educators and psychologists believe that there is a set of basic skills that distinguish creative thinking from other types of thinking, and that these skills may appear simple when teaching them to students. However, they require advanced mental processes, careful planning and knowledge of the necessary sub-skills. Researchers have classified creative thinking skills into different categories based on the diversity and multiplicity of definitions that deal with creative thinking. Accordingly, the researcher adopted four areas that the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking (TTCT) measures for creative thinking: fluency, flexibility, originality and elaboration (Abu & Nofal, 2007). These components can be explained as follows.

Fluency: Jarwan (2012) defines fluency as the ability to generate a large number of alternatives, synonyms, ideas, problems or uses when responding to a specific stimulus and the speed and ease involved in generating them. It involves the recall of information, experiences or concepts previously learned. Fluency is divided into verbal fluency, intellectual fluency, fluency of meanings and fluency of forms. Saadah (2015) states that fluency helps students move smoothly and easily from long-term memory to ideas related to the topic, which helps with dealing and solving problems easily, making decisions and thinking in a variety of creative ways.

Flexibility: Flexibility refers to a change in the state of mind according to the changing of a situation or topic. Alwan (2012) and Jarwan (2012) consider flexibility to be the ability to generate various unexpected ideas, direct these ideas and transform the course of thinking with the change of the stimulus or the requirements of the situation. Flexibility has several varieties, including the following: (a) Adaptive flexibility, refers to the ability of the individual to change his way of thinking quickly to face a new situation or problem. (b) Spontaneous flexibility, refers to the ability of the individual to shift the focus of his thinking in multiple directions easily. (c) Flexibility of re-definition, which means abandoning an old concept or relationship to address a new problem. The importance of flexibility is that it helps students to change their thinking from time to time; in addition, it allows them to consider different points of view and broaden their horizons beyond familiar advice.

Originality: Qatami (2004) indicates that originality is the ability of the individual to give original and new responses in terms of their diversity, recency and rarity. Al-Titi (2001) defines originality as the skill used to think differently and uniquely. Originality depends on the value and quality of one’s ideas.

Elaboration: Elaboration is represented in building on the basis of given information to complete a certain structure from its various aspects, so that it becomes more detailed. It represents the student’s ability to provide new additions and details to an idea, to make it more appropriate to face a problem and persuade others of the solution and leads in turn to more information and other additions (Qatami, 2004; Rayan, 2004).

Since creative thinking skills are of great importance, especially in the process of learning and teaching students, many educational systems have shown an interest in making these skills embody a tangible reality in the students’ scientific life. Creative thinking skills may be taught through training programs and innovation in strategies and teaching methods or curricula and coursework in particular. School curricula are an essential element in any educational system because they provide students with diverse experiences, skills and activities that enable them to interact positively with the surrounding environment. This is reflected positively in achieving the comprehensive and integrated growth of students’ personality. Further, creative thinking helps them to face the problems of life effectively, which requires designing curricula based on a clear vision to develop and refine creative thinking skills (Al-Bari, 2013).

Due to the importance of studying creative thinking skills, the educational implications and relevant educational development, researchers have conducted many scientific studies. A number of relevant previous studies are organized chronologically from newest to oldest below.

Al Saudi and Al-Akoul (2017) conducted a study aimed at identifying the thinking skills included in the activities of the Islamic education curricula for the eighth grade in Jordan, using a list of thinking skills of five main areas including basic thinking skills, critical thinking skills, problem-solving skills, creative thinking skills and metacognition skills. The study findings indicated that basic thinking skills came in first place with a frequency of 67%, critical thinking skills came in second place at 27% and creative thinking skills had a frequency of 0.007%.

Al-Amiri (2017) conducted an analytical study of the ‘My Beautiful Language’ curriculum for the sixth grade in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia with a focus on creative thinking skills. He used an analysis card that included 33 items in four areas of fluency, flexibility, originality and elaboration. The study findings indicated a weak inclusion of creative thinking skills in the targeted curriculum, whether in the cognitive content or accompanying activities. Al-Mahyawi and Hajji (2017) revealed the degree of observing creative thinking skills in the Arabic language curricula for the first-grade secondary education in Saudi Arabia. The study sample consisted of 348 evaluation activities. The most frequent skill was fluency, with an average of (30%), followed by originality (29.5%), elaboration (21.5%), and flexibility (19%).

Al-Bayati (2015) conducted a study aimed at investigating creative thinking skills in reading curricula and text questions for the first intermediate grade in Iraq using an analysis card that included 27 indicative items. The study findings indicated a low frequency of creative thinking skills. Fluency skill had a frequency of 47.95%, followed by elaboration (19.88%), originality (18.12%) and flexibility (14.03%).

Wang (2012) aimed to investigate the relationship between creative thinking skills on one hand and reading and writing skills on the other hand. The study sample included 196 students from a university in Taiwan from the English, Chinese, Mathematics and Science departments. To achieve its goal, the study used a questionnaire and the TTCT for assessing creative thinking skills. The study found a relationship between reading, methodology and creative thinking, especially with elaboration. The study did not refer to big differences between the four departments in the two skills of fluency and flexibility.

Al-Zaid (2012) studied the evaluation activities of the Islamic education curricula developed for the fourth-grade primary in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in the light of the development of creative thinking skills. He used an analysis card consisting of 43 items distributed under the skills of fluency, flexibility and originality. The study concluded that creative thinking skills are available in the curricula of the Hadith and Sera prophetic tradition and biography, followed by curricula of jurisprudence and behaviour (Fiqh) and finally the curricula of monotheism (Tawheed).

Karatas and Ozcan (2010) aimed to find out the effect of a curriculum containing a set of activities and exercises that focused on creativity and developing the creative thinking skills of sixth-grade students in 41 topics. The findings showed statistically significant differences among the experimental group that studied the curriculum that contains creativity-focused activities.

Sheikh Al-Eid (2010) conducted a study of the curriculum ‘Our Beautiful Language’ of the basic fourth grade in Palestine. The study aimed at analysing the evaluation activities in the light of creative thinking skills, and the extent to which students acquired them. Using the analysis card for activity evaluation in the target curriculum, the study findings indicated a low percentage of the inclusion of creative thinking skills in the activity evaluation with a percentage of 18.5%. The skill of fluency came first in terms of frequency, followed by elaboration, flexibility and finally, originality.

Al-Bakr (2002) conducted a study aimed at identifying creative thinking skills in the curricula of religious sciences in the last three grades of the elementary stage in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Using the content analysis card that included 38 criteria revealed a low percentage of creative thinking skills in the targeted curricula in a range of 9.8–14.73%.

Harkow (1996) aimed to develop creative thinking skills through developing verbal and visual creativity, fluency and originality and verbal imaging. The second- and third-grade gifted students were trained on these skills using imagination, computer skills and problem solving. The TTCT for creative thinking skills was applied before and after conducting the experiment, where the findings showed that there is a development in the skills of verbal and imaging creativity, verbal authenticity and verbal flexibility by 80%. However, the development of verbal fluency and visual and imaging originality had lower frequencies.

Teresita (1993) aimed to find out the effect of applying some educational activities on the development of creative thinking abilities on a sample of poor children in the Philippines, where the lessons contained creative activities such as problem solving and brainstorming. The study found that students who were taught more lessons in creative activities showed improvement and development in creative thinking skills, namely fluency, flexibility and originality.

Reviewing the relevant previous studies makes clear that they agree with the current study in some respects, including the use of descriptive and analytical approach. Some studies have dealt with evaluation activities (Al-Mahyawi & Hajji, 2017; Al-Zaid, 2012; Al Saudi & Al-Akoul, 2017; Sheikh Al-Eid, 2010). In addition to the aforementioned studies, a few other studies have agreed on the effectiveness and importance of including creative thinking skills in curricula’ activities and topics (Harkow, 1996; Karatas & Ozcan, 2010; Teresita, 1993; Wang, 2012).

The findings of all previous studies recommend the necessity of working on formulating knowledge content and accompanying activities that develop students’ creative thinking skills. The researcher benefited a lot from these studies, their methods, study tools and the interpretation of their findings. The current study is distinguished from previous studies by analysing the content of evaluation questions in the targeted Islamic education curricula of Tawhid, Hadith, Tafseer and Fiqh for the first intermediate grade in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in the light of creative thinking skills. Such an ‘analytical study’ has not been tackled by previous studies to the best of the researcher’s knowledge.

3. PROBLEM STATEMENT

Since the beginning of the 21st century, the world has witnessed a tremendous and rapid development in scientific and knowledge fields as a result of several factors, including the tremendous knowledge revolution and rapid technical applications. This has cast a shadow over the educational system and all its elements, including the development of curricula. It is necessary for decision-makers in the educational system to keep pace with these qualitative changes to achieve the aspirations and desired goals of the learner, whose role has become essential and participatory in the educational process. The current era is being characterized by progress and cognitive changes and the use of dense and accessible information at an increasing speed; hence, thinking skills are an inevitable necessity. Educational institutions devote their efforts to making qualitative shifts in learning and outcomes with the aim of producing a generation that has the ability to deal with the challenges facing society (Fulford, 2016). They seek appropriate opportunities to develop teaching strategies that support thinking. As effective learning cannot depend on the quantity of knowledge and information alone and requires the process how it should be used, (Rutten & Soetaert, 2016) the attention of educators has focused on developing teaching strategies that are concerned with active learning based on the interaction of learners with each other in the educational situation.

Creative thinking skills constitute an important strategic dimension of the educational system in general, and they are also considered an essential component of the Islamic education curricula. Islamic education is concerned with the status and cause of Islamic obligation. There are multiple noble Quranic verses and noble prophetic traditions that call for the use of reason, thinking, good vision and discernment. The current study helps school curricula to achieve its purpose through good selection of contents, activities and experience, especially the content of evaluation questions. The study revealed that the content of evaluation questions stimulates students’ thinking and generates curiosity towards the subject they study, taking into consideration the individual differences among students. for instance, reasoning skills help increase their academic achievement. Furthermore, it is an important factor in helping the learner to develop self-learning skills and measure his achievement level (Cannon, 2012). The effect of questions and exercises depends on their quality, the manner in which they were formulated and the cognitive, mental or emotional aspects that they measure (Brown, 2000).

Previous studies have confirmed the importance of creative thinking skills in education. Moreover, the importance of the educational system in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia necessitates analysing and developing curricula in form and content using feedback based on scientific basis. All this generated the researcher’s curiosity to conduct this study and to investigate the extent to which creative thinking skills are available in the evaluation question content of Islamic education curricula ofTawhid, Hadith, Tafseer and Fiqh.

4. QUESTION AND OBJECTIVE OF THE STUDY

The problem of the current study can be identified by trying to answer the following main question: To what extent are creative thinking skills included in the evaluation question content in the Islamic education curricula for the first intermediate grade in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia?

The objective of the study is to investigate the degree of creative thinking skill availability in the evaluation questions contained in the Islamic Education Curricula for the first intermediate grade in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

5. IMPORTANCE OF THE STUDY

This study is expected to contribute to the following:

6. TERMINOLOGY OF THE STUDY

Creative thinking skills: These are the skills that enable the student to produce the largest number of ideas about the problem he is exposed to. These ideas are characterized by diversity and difference, and they are neither repeated nor common (Habash, 2002). These skills are measured procedurally in this study through the relevant tool, which includes 29 skill items distributed across the main areas of creative thinking: fluency, flexibility, originality, details and elaboration.

Content of evaluation questions: A question is defined as a prompt that calls for a reaction or a response. It requires the learner to think and examine the educational material on hand, then retrieve the information stored in his/her memory in a way that helps him/her answer the question correctly (Cannon, 2012; Talbot, 2001). The researcher defines the evaluation questions procedurally based on the questions available at the end of each lesson in the prescribed Islamic education curricula text books for the first intermediate grade in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

7. LIMITATIONS OF THE STUDY

The limitations of the study included the following:

1. The academic objective limit, which was represented by two elements:

2. Time Limit: The study was conducted in the first semester of the academic year 2020-21.

8. STUDY METHODOLOGY AND PROCEDURES

The researcher followed the content analysis method suitable for achieving the objectives of the current study and answering its questions. The researcher relied on quantitative estimates to reveal the extent to which creative thinking skills are included in the evaluation questions in the Islamic education curricula for the first intermediate grade in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

8.1. Study Population and Samples

The study population consisted of all evaluation questions included in the Islamic education curricula of Tawhid, Hadith, Tafseer and Fiqh for the first intermediate grade in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, which included 970 questions.

8.2. Study Instrument

The study instrument was an analysis card that included creative thinking skills for all questions of the lessons, and the question unit was adopted as a category or unit for analysis.

8.3. Study Variables

The study included the following variables:

8.4. Validity of the Instrument

Taaima (2008) indicates that the objective of the validity of content analysis is to reveal the phenomena and features for which the research is being conducted. The validity of the current study tool was verified by two methods: the content validity and the face validity.

8.5. Reliability of the Analysis

To ensure the reliability of the tool, the researcher used the following two methods:

8.6. Analysis Procedures

After determining the goal of the analysis, building the study instrument and ensuring its validity and reliability, the researcher analysed the content of the evaluation questions of the lessons and study units according to the following steps:

  1. Determining categories of the analysis

The analysis categories refer to a set of main characteristics and specifications that are determined according to the quality of the analysed content as well as the aim of the analysis (Stake, 2010). Since the objective of the analysis was to investigate the degree to which evaluation questions included the creative thinking skills, the analysis categories in the current study were represented by four analytical categories of creative thinking skills: fluency, flexibility, originality and details and elaboration. The tool with sub-indicators for each skill finally contained a total of 29 items (see Appendix 1).

  1. The researcher read the educational content and evaluation questions carefully to determine the location of each question in relation to the sub-indicators emanating from the four main categories. The researcher ensured using the following controls:
  1. The analysis process included all final evaluation questions (essay questions and objective questions) of each lesson as well as the questions for the units.
  2. Each idea in the compound question of two or more ideas were considered as independent questions. The multiplicity of parts in one question were considered as independent evaluation questions, and they were given a classification and frequency of their own.
  3. If the question contained branches, each branch was considered an independent question by itself, and it was given a classification and a frequency of its own. These branches might not be alternatives from which the student chose only one answer, as with objective questions or multiple-choice questions.

8.7. Application of the Instrument

The application of the instrument was to extract the relative weights for each area of ​​creative thinking skills in the questions of the targeted curricula and record the results of the analysis and classification in special tables using frequencies and percentages.

9. FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION

The researcher aimed to answer the main question of the study: ‘To what extent are creative thinking skills included in the evaluation questions of the Islamic education curricula of the first intermediate grade in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia?’ The frequency and relative weight of each of the creative thinking skills included in the content of the evaluation questions were calculated. The total of the evaluation questions related to creative thinking skills reached 227 questions. The total number of the evaluation questions was 970 questions. Both are shown below in Table 1.

The results in Table 1 show that evaluation question content in the Islamic education curricula of Tawhid, Hadith, Tafseer and Fiqh for the first intermediate grade in Saudi Arabia have been distributed into various areas of creative thinking skills in varying random percentages. The questions of details and elaboration skill are in the first place of the evaluation questions in the targeted curricula with a total of 77 questions at 8%. In decreasing order of frequency, there follows fluency with a total number of 65 questions at 6.7%, flexibility with a total of 49 questions at 5% and originality with a total of 36 questions at 3.7%. The total number of related questions was 227 out of 970 questions subject of the evaluation at a percentage of 23.4%.

Table-1. The relative weight of creative thinking skills areas in the evaluation questions in the curricula of the first intermediate grade in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. ( based on  an analysis card prepared by the author as a study instrument).

Skill
Tawhid
Hadith
Tafseer
Fiqh
Total
Percentage
Dimensions
Frequency
Frequency
Frequency
Frequency
Fluency
20
18
15
12
65
6.70
Flexibility
11
14
10
14
49
5.00
Originality
9
11
7
9
36
3.70
Details and Elaboration
19
18
17
23
77
8.00
Total
59
61
49
58
227
23.40%

The researcher attributes these results to the lack of a certain standard by which curriculum planners and developers consider thinking skills in general and creativity in particular. Therefore, the evaluation question content needs to be improvised. The reason may lie in the curriculum developers’ view that the content of Islamic education should be based on memorization and recall. This view may affect the quality of the oral questions asked by the teacher in class situations or daily and seasonal tests. This in turn may also affect students’ thinking skills and their ability to solve and face daily problems. This result is consistent with the findings of previous research (Al-Amiri, 2017; Al-Bayati, 2015; Al-Mahyawi & Hajji, 2017; Al Saudi & Al-Akoul, 2017; Sheikh Al-Eid, 2010) which are evidence of a lack of interest in school curricula towards developing creative thinking skills. Therefore, this study concludes with a number of conclusions, recommendations and proposals as stated in the next section.

10. CONCLUSION

Based on findings of the current study, and in response to the study’s main question regarding the extent to which creative thinking skills are included in the evaluation questions in Islamic education curricula like Tawhid, Hadith, Tafseer and Fiqh, for the first intermediate grade in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the current study offers the following conclusions. First, it has been observed that the number of questions of creative thinking skills in the evaluation questions of Islamic education curricula for the first intermediate grade in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia are low. Frequencies are found very few compared to the size of the curricula and the number of evaluation questions related to creative thinking skills. They were distributed over the various areas of the four main creative thinking skill categories in this study namely Tawhid, Hadith, Tafseer and Fiqh. There were 227 relevant questions out of a total of 970 evaluation questions in the educational curricula in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

Second, the researcher does not determine any logical standard for explaining the emergence of creative thinking skills in varying percentages of the four main areas in the educational curricula in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. This may confirm what is indicated in the discussion of the findings that the reason for this may be due to the lack of a well-studied scientific methodology in developing and preparing evaluation questions. Further, it may also be because the curriculum planners and developers think that teaching and learning in Islamic education is based on memorization and recall, especially in this educational stage. They may be influenced by old psychological basis that each learner has separate mental faculties, and he must recite what he has learned when needed.

10.1. Recommendations

In the light of the theoretical literature and the findings of the study, the researcher recommends the following:

10.2. Proposals

In the light of the theoretical literature and the findings of this study, the researcher suggests the following:

Funding: This study received no specific financial support.  

Competing Interests: The author declares that there are no conflicts of interests regarding the publication of this paper.

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 Appendix-1. Card prepared by the author for main areas and sub skills of contents of books subject of the study.

Main areas Serial Sub-Skills
Fluency 1 The question prompts the reader to come up with new ideas.
2 The question leads the reader to develop imagination.
3 The question encourages passing legal rulings in jurisprudential issues.
4 The question evokes a large number of ideas appropriate to a given situation.
5 The question prompts more than one aspect of difference between two things being approached.
6 The question helps with providing more than one result dependent on a situation or idea in the text.
7 The question encourages providing many examples related to the content of the lesson.
Flexibility 1 The question leads to a variety of examples that encourage flexibility in thinking.
2 The question leads to expressing more than one opinion on the topic at hand.
3 The question urges the student to develop advanced ideas that increase his legal knowledge.
4 The question helps the student find explanations for a situation in the text.
5 The question helps arrange ideas in the text in different ways.
6 The question requires giving various analyses of the situation or topic.
7 The question prompts the expectation of varied outcomes based on the events or ideas included in the text.
Originality 1 The question prompts the student to come to new conclusions.
2 The question urges the student to search for new solutions to the problem at hand.
3 The question directs the student to interact with the text and predict new ideas.
4 The question directs the student to express the text in a creative way.
5 The question helps give new and unfamiliar interpretations and ideas.
6 The question helps to produce rare, indirect inferences about the situation.
7 There are open-ended prompts like ‘What if?’ and ‘Imagine if such and such happened.’
8 The question helps the student in employing facts and ideas in new and unfamiliar situations.
Detail and Elaboration 1 The question provides an opportunity to elaborate the answer.
2 The question directs the student to explain phrases in the text in his own words and style.
3 The questions help to mention contemporary issues similar to the main ones in the text.
4 The questions provide mental clues that support a specific idea or position contained in the content.
5 The questions provide traditional evidence not found in the written content.
6 The questions encourage the student to use various sources of knowledge.
7 The question leads to the development of jurisprudential knowledge.


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