Incorporating critical thinking in the pedagogical content of a teacher education programme: does it make a difference?

Abstract

Recent educational policies, national reports, and voluminous literature stress that critical thinking (CT) is an essential skill in any stage of schooling for producing critical thinkers and ensuring better learning. The importance of teaching CT has been raised in teacher education programmes because students are supposed to teach this skill in schools in the future. This study therefore assesses the effects of a CT-based pedagogical course on student teachers’ content knowledge and CT disposition. A pre-test–post-test experimental study was carried out in a vocational pre-service teacher education programme in Turkey. Although the students who were exposed to CT-based instruction showed better progress in both academic achievement and CT disposition than in traditional instruction, this result was not statistically significant according to the Mixed Factorial ANOVA and ANCOVA results.

Keywords:

• critical thinking
• critical thinking-based instruction
• critical thinking disposition
• academic achievement
• teacher education

Acknowledgements

This paper is a part of the first author’s dissertation submitted to the Graduate School of Social Sciences of Middle East Technical University (METU), Turkey, in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Educational Sciences and carried out under the second author’s supervisor. She wishes to thank her advisor Associate Professor Dr Ahmet Ok and her committee members: Associate Professor Dr Gary M. Grossman from Arizona State University, Professor Dr Ali Yıldırım, Professor Dr Soner Yıldırım, and Assistant Professor Dr Yeşim Çapa Aydın from METU for their contributions.