The evaluation of teacher candidates’ using the skills of critical thinking strategies

Abstract

The main purpose of this study is the evaluation of teacher candidates’ using the skills of their critical thinking strategies. The population of the study consists of the teacher candidates who are in the first class of the departments in the academic year 2014-2015 at the Faculty of Education in Siirt Universtiy. The sample of the study also comprises of 318 students who were determined by sampling randomly and who study in the Primary School Teacher Training programme, Science Teacher Training programme, Elementary School Math Teacher Training programme, Social Studies Teacher Training programme of The Department of Secondary School Teacher Training; in the Turkish Teacher Training Programme of the Department of Turkish Education. In the study as the data collection tool, “The Critical Thinking Strategies Survey” which is developed by Koç (2015) and of which realiability and validity studies have been done under the light of the results of pre-application and expert thought has been used. In the analysing of the data, frequency, percentage, arithmetic average and chisquare have been used. As a result, teacher candidates’ using the skills of critical thinking strategies are evaluated according to the different variables (gender, department) and it is obvious that in general there isn’t significant difference among the thoughts of the teacher candidates, but in particular it has emerged that significant difference for some items has been found. Based on these results, it was found in a set of suggestions on critical thinking strategies.