Organising The Distribution of Thinking Levels at Different Education Levels in Indonesia Sutrisno 1 Department of Civil Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Universitas Negeri Malang, Indonesia sutrisno.ft@um.ac.id Antelas Eka Winahyo 2 Department of Civil Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Universitas Negeri Malang, Indonesia Ahmad Dardiri 3 Department of Civil Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Universitas Negeri Malang, Indonesia Abstract: This paper discusses the distribution of thinking levels at different education levels in Indonesia. The research method involved discussion and formulation supported by literature review. The results showed the distribution of thinking levels at various educational levels. The distribution of thinking levels at the elementary school level is C1: 60%, C2: 38%, and C3: 2%. The distribution of thinking levels at the junior high school level is C1: 18%, C2: 60%, C3: 20%, and C4: 2%. The distribution of thinking levels at the high school level is C1: 2%, C2: 24%, C3: 52%, C4: 20%, and C5: 2%. The distribution of thinking levels at the bachelor’s degree (S1) level is C2 : 4%, C3: 37%, C4 : 45%, C5: 12%, and C6: 2%. The distribution of thinking levels at the master’s degree (S2) level is C3: 4%, C4: 40%, C5 : 46%, and C6 : 10%. The distribution of thinking levels at the doctoral degree (S3) level is C4 : 7%, C5 : 46%, and C6 : 47%. Keywords: Thinking Level, Education Level I. INTRODUCTION One of the objectives of Indonesian national education is to enlighten the life of the nation. This educational aim is achieved in stages starting from primary to secondary and tertiary education [1]. Educating the nation means to create an enlightened and intellectual national life with an improved ability to solve problems. The higher the education level of the population, the closer the nation would be to achieving its goal to enhance the development of intellectual and thinking capacities. An attempt to achieve higher thinking skills should be preceded by efforts to develop lower order thinking—the foundation set of skills required for levelling up [2]. In other words, it is necessary to classify thinking abilities into levels of specificity and complexity, assign the appropriate thinking skills to each level of education, and determine the degree of success and development of the thinking process of students from primary, secondary and tertiary education. By doing so, potential failure can be properly and specifically identified. There has not been established a standard for determining the level of thinking which should be achieved in each level of education. Researchers prefer to use the same standard set of thinking skills for all primary, secondary and higher education levels, i.e. higher order thinking. The research results, therefore, mostly do not reflect the actual standard level of thinking at the level of primary, secondary, or tertiary education. Most often than not, many simply conclude that the output quality of education is poor if higher levels of thinking are not achieved—even though what is being assessed is the primary education level. In fact, not all levels of education must reach high-level thinking. It is, therefore, necessary to formulate a standard framework for determining the proportion of thinking skills should be developed and practised in each level of education in Indonesia; it will serve as a basis for evaluation. This paper aims to shed light on the distribution of thinking levels at the elementary school, junior high school, senior high school, bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degree levels. II. DISCUSSION Thinking Levels Bloom’s Taxonomy breaks up thinking into six levels, namely knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. In the revised version, the process of thinking involves, from the simplest to the most complex, knowledge (C1), comprehension (C2), applying (C3), analysing (C4), evaluating (C5), and creating (C6) [3]. These six levels of thinking are categorised into lower- and higher-order thinking. Experts hold differing opinions on categorising each thinking level as lower-order thinking or higher-order thinking. One stated that analysis, synthesis, and evaluation are higher-order thinking skills [4]. Another argued that higher-order thinking (HOT) includes application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation [5]. Higher-order thinking is also considered as solving tasks in new contexts/situations [6]. The application level often falls into both categories, LOT and HOT. It belongs to HOT if it requires the application of knowledge in a new situation [6,7]. In sum, the levels of thinking based on Bloom's classification system include knowledge or memorisation (C1), comprehension (C2), application (C3), analysis (C4), evaluation (C5), and creation (C6); C1-C3 are the lower- order thinking, while C3-C6 belong to the higher-order thinking. Education Levels In Indonesia, the education levels consist of elementary school (Sekolah Dasar, or SD), junior high school (Sekolah 2nd International Conference on Vocational Education and Training (ICOVET 2018) Copyright © 2019, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). Advances in Social Science, Education and Humanities Research, volume 242 197