Acquisition of Basic and Integrated Science Process Skills Amongst Form 2 Students in Sarawak

Science educators have strongly recommended that paper-and-pencil group testing format be used to measure process skills competency, which can be administered efficiently and objectively without requiring expensive resources. This paper reports the use of an authordeveloped psychometrically-supported Malaysian-Based Basic and Integrated Science Process Skills Inventory (MB-BISPSI) to gauge the acquisition of science process skills amongst 1021 Form 2 students (548 girls and 473 boys) from seven (four rural and three interior) secondary schools in Kapit Division, Sarawak, exploring the interaction effects of gender, ethnicity, and school location. The findings indicated that the students achieved a mastery level which fell short of the two-third benchmark for the overall science process skills, basic and integrated science process skills, and also for each of the specific 12 science process skills. Additionally, gender-ethnicity interaction effect was found to be statistically significant; while female students generally achieved a markedly higher mean percentage score in the overall Science Process Skills than did the male students, and such a phenomenon was only observed amongst the Kenyah ethnicity. In terms of location, there was no significant difference in the acquisition of science process skills between rural and interior students. Implications for a more thoughtful inculcation of science process skills are proffered alongside recommendations for future research using a more nationally representative sample to examine the validity of such generalisation.