Abstract

Critical thinking and higher-order thinking skills (HOTS) are important outcomes of Grade 8 Araling Panlipunan because learners must examine historical information, evaluate evidence, and justify interpretations. This proposed study aims to assess whether teacher-guided AI-assisted learning activities are associated with changes in these competencies among Grade 8 learners at Diniog National High School, Dilasag District, Schools Division of Aurora. The planned approach is a quantitative one-group pretest–posttest design using curriculum-aligned tasks assessing analysis, interpretation, evaluation, problem-solving, and evidence-based reasoning. Participant recruitment, instrument validation, intervention duration, and school approvals remain to be finalized and documented. Descriptive statistics and a paired-samples test are proposed for genuine paired assessment data. To demonstrate the intended presentation of results, this draft includes a fully dataset for 30 learners. The scores yielded a pretest mean of 12.33 and posttest mean of 16.90 out of 25; these values are not observed outcomes and provide no empirical evidence about the school. The project is intended to inform responsible AI-assisted historical inquiry and the assessment of higher-order cognitive skills after actual classroom implementation.