Study of Critical Thinking Skill Patterns in Pre-service Physics Teachers Through Cluster Analysis

Critical thinking skills are very important for pre-service teachers to train. Therefore, it is important to analyze their pattern for pre-service physics teachers. This empirical research uses a quantitative approach. Data collection was measured using critical thinking skills tests. The indicators studied, include elementary clarification, basic support, inference, advanced clarification, and strategy and tactics. This instrument is in multiple-choice form with five answer options. One hundred pre-service physics teachers participated in this research. The data analysis were done using K-means clustering. The results of this research show that there are five groups of critical thinking skill mindsets for pre-service physics teachers. In addition, it was found that the pattern of critical thinking skills of pre-service physics teachers among students was in the elementary clarification (47.50) indicator in the very-low category, basic support (50.50) in the low category, inference (60.99) in the fair category, advanced clarification (43.00) with the very-low category, and strategy and tactics (52.50) with the low category. These results indicate that the pattern of critical thinking skills of pre-service physics teachers needs to receive more attention to be improved in the future. Keywords: critical thinking skills, K-means clustering, pre-service physics teachers