The effectiveness of hybrid learning-based adaptive media to empower student’s critical thinking skills: is it really for VARK learning style? / Hernawan Sulistyanto ... [et al.]

Students needed to understand more complex knowledge through critical thinking. The discovery of a good understanding could be directed with high critical thinking skills. This study intended to propose a new learning approach, namely a hybrid learning model that adapts the VARK learning style to empower students' critical thinking skills. The research used the Research and Development method which includes the stages of exploration, development, testing, and dissemination. Adaptive learning media had been designed to implement the proposed new learning model. Testing the research product used 98 elementary school students in Surakarta City who were taken through the cluster random sampling technique. Product effectiveness analysis used the Wilcoxon Signed Rank Test and the Mann-Whitney U test after knowing the results of the normality and homogeneity prerequisite tests. The score for increasing critical thinking skills in the aspect of interpretation was 94.18%, the inference was 77.74%, the explanation was 97.33%, the analysis was 98.87%, evaluation was 65.01%, and self-regulation was 97.13 %. The test results prove that adaptive media based on hybrid learning models has a very significant impact on improving students' critical thinking aspects. This implied that the application of the hybrid learning model by adjusting the VARK learning style is able to effectively improve students' critical thinking skills.