مرکز منطقه ای اطلاع رساني علوم و فناوري - An Analysis of the Turkish Teacher Candidates Critical Thinking Skills

Abstract :

The purpose of this study was to investigate whether Turkish Education teacher candidates critical thinking skills differ or not in terms of several variables. For this purpose, the following questions were tried to be answered: Does Turkish Education teacher candidates critical thinking skills differ with respect to their gender, academic achievement scores, feeling successful in comprehension skills (listening-reading) and explaining skills (speaking -writing)? It was a survey study. The participants of the study were 123 Turkish Education Department students who were in third and fourth class at Mehmet Akif Ersoy University, Faculty of Education in 2010-2011 academic years. In the study, in order to collect data the 30-item of Critical Thinking Scale developed by Ozdemir (2005) was applied. The obtained data was transferred to a computer and analyzed by using SPSS(15.0) software program. The results of analysis showed that the Turkish Education teacher candidates’critical thinking skill doesn’t differ significantly in terms of gender, academic achievement scores. The candidates critical thinking skills showed a significant difference according to their feeling of success in reading and speaking skills but not according to their feeling of success in explaining skills listening and writing.