The effect of critical thinking based activities on students' critical thinking skills

The main purpose of this research is to investigate the effects of critical thinking-based activities on students' critical thinking skills. The research is a pre-test post-test control group of experimental research types. In the research, in the 2023-2024 academic year, one of the 4th grade students who were in a primary school in the district of Altıeylül in the province of Balıkesir, one of the two groups was determined as an experiment and the other as a control group which is formed by neutral assignment. The study group consisted with the experimental group 33 students (19 girls, 14 boys), the control group 34 students (15 girls, 19 boys), totally 77 students (34 girls, 33 boys). No study was performed with the control group. In order to collect data, personal information form and Cornell Critical Thinking Test Level X (CCTTLX) were used. CCTTLX was applied twice before and after the experimental procedure (pretest-posttest). SPSS 20th package program was used for data analysis. In this study, the pre-test and post-test applied to the experiment and control groups was tested, as well as the descriptive statistics and the normality of the distribution of the measurements. As a result of the analysis of the distribution of normality by Shapiro Wilk test, the distributions were found to be normal. In this context, analyzes were made by parametric tests. The unrelated samples T-test was used to compare the pretest scores obtained from the CCTTLX scale, and the related samples T-test was used to compare the pre-test and post-test scores in the control and test group in their own group. At the end of the application, in the comparison of the post-test scores of the experimental and control groups, analysis was performed again with the Unrelated Samples T-Test. According to the results of the analysis, there was no significant difference between the pre-test scores of the students in the experimental and control groups. While there was no significant difference between the pre-test and post-test scores of the control group students, it was concluded that there was a significant difference between the pre-test and post-test scores of the experimental group where skill-based critical thinking activities were applied in terms of development of critical thinking skills. In the analysis results of critical thinking-based activities for the impact of critical thinking skills, a significant difference was found in the critical thinking skills of the experimental group subject to experimental study. However, no significant statistical result was found in the experimental and control group post-test scores that the students in the experimental group who were subject to experimental treatment had a more comprehensive critical thinking skill than the students in the control group who were not subject to the program.