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Participation in the study was voluntary and each 
participant was permitted to withdraw anytime during 
the data collection process.
FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION 
The results of this study is divided into three sections: 
Bloom‟s revised taxonomy elements identified during 
storytelling activity in the first cycle of CAR, HOTS 
activities identified during the second cycle, and 
challenges teachers experienced in developing students‟ 
HOTS elements and some possible solutions offered.
Thinking skill activities in the first cycle of 
storytelling 
Data obtained from observation, interview and 
document analysis during the first cycle show that 
students‟ thinking skills were limited to remembering 
and understanding the facts from the story which are 
only of knowledge and comprehension levels (Bloom, 
1984). Students have not reached applying, analyzing 
and higher level
. 
This means that they still have lower 
order thinking skills (LOTS) as they only remembered, 
understood, and mentioned aspects of stories they had 
learned during the learning process. For example, when 
the teacher asked some possible meanings from the 
story tittle, the students only provided one single exact 
answer without trying to find out other alternative 
meanings. During the discussion, the students were only 
able to remember the name of the characters of the story 
and some important events in the story without 
providing logical justification to their answers.
This LOTS activity also influences the learning 
process. Students tend to show low engagement when 
they are only individually exposed to knowledge and 
comprehension questions. Observations show how 
students in both classrooms were not really engaged in 
the learning process due to teacher‟s inability to involve 
them in more challenging activities. They did not really 
enjoy listening and then discussing the story told to 
them due to teachers‟ ways of organizing learning 
activities. The story was not really familiar to the 
students so that they ignored the discussion and show 
psychological boredom when taking part in the 
classroom activity. These practices do not represent the 
philosophy of the 2013 National Curriculum which 
emphasizes learning autonomy, local content, and group 
project. Besides, HOTS should also be developed 
through social activities like group project (Vainikainen 
et al., 2015; Vijayaratnam, 2012). 
Some 
reasons 
underlie 
the 
minimum 
implementation of HOTS activities in the first cycle. 
First, the teacher did not give some 
open-ended 
questions such as 
how, why, why if,
and 
how if 
which 
lead to their use of HOTS. Thus, the teachers did not 
stimulate students‟ higher order thinking when reading 
the short story by inviting them to think more critically 
based on evidences in the story. During this first cycle, 
the teachers simply asked the characters in the story, the 
plot and the conflicts occurred, for example, “
who were 
they in the story? when and where did the farmer go?”
Such these remembering and understanding questions 
belong to lower order thinking skills as they do not 
require students to think critically by providing their 
opinions, reasons (agreement and disagreement) and 
sharing their experience relevant to the story.
Teachers 
seemed 
to 
have 
problems 
in 
implementing HOTS within storytelling. Interviews 
with teachers show several problems they face in 
running HOTS activities. The first problem relates to 
teachers‟ lacking the knowledge of story and 
storytelling process. The two participating teachers are 
not used to reading stories loudly, let alone writing their 
own stories. One teacher said that “we 
never develop 
our own story…so far we only adapt the story available 
in the textbook”. Copying stories from textbooks does 
not provide teachers with necessary storytelling 
competence which can attract the students‟ minds and 
stimulate their critical thinking skills.
In addition to low reading habit, the teachers also 
highlight their insufficient linguistic knowledge which 
include grammar and reading skills. Due to this low 
grammar skill, they cannot creatively improvise the 
stories taken from the textbooks
. One teacher said, “I 
just know that story always use simple present tense and 
never think that other tenses can be used in this 
context”. Such statement indirectly indicates that the 
teacher did not have sufficient ability to compose their 
own stories, particularly those which relate to the 

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