There are still many students' critical thinking skills which are categorized as sufficient because some students do not understand the material with a broad scope well. This study aims to 1) examine differences in students' critical thinking abilities through the application of discovery learning models and association methods 2) examine differences in students' critical thinking abilities through the application of discovery learning models and mind mapping methods 3) examine differences in students' critical thinking abilities through the application of the association method and the mind mapping method. This research is a quasi-experimental research with a quantitative approach. The research design used was a pretest-posttest control group design to measure students' critical thinking skills. The population in this study were students of class XI SMA Negeri 2 Surakarta for the 2022/2023 academic year. The sample of this study was class XI MIPA 1 as the experimental class 1, XI MIPA 2 as the experimental class 2, and XI MIPA 5 as the control class. Collecting data on critical thinking skills using a description test. The results of the prerequisite test are normal and homogeneous critical thinking ability data. The results of the hypothesis test on critical thinking ability data are (1) there is a significant difference in students' critical thinking abilities between classes that use only discovery learning models and discovery learning model classes that use the association method (2) there are significant differences in students' critical thinking skills between classes that use the discovery learning model only and the discovery learning model class that uses the mind mapping method; (3) there is no difference between the discovery learning class that uses the association method and the discovery learning class that uses the mind mapping method.