Improving thinking skills of young learners through task-based learning

Thinking skills are important both for the individual and the society. They are important for the individual in terms of personal and professional development and they are important for the society in terms of a democratic and developed society. One of the thinking skills, critical thinking, has a great role in our lives as the other thinking skills. A critical thinker is successful in all parts of life in general because a critical thinker can handle the everyday problems of life easily, can find a good job, be successful in education, is good at communicating with people and give reasonable decisions in life. Therefore, critical thinking should be taught at schools. In some countries, they are included in the curriculum as in Turkey. In the curriculum of the Turkish Ministry of Education, the theory part is well enough, but there are problems in the practice part.Therefore, this study aims to find out whether critical thinking, one of the thinking skills, of young learners can be improved through task-based learning. This study is both a qualitative and a quantitative study which lasted during four months. Out of five 6th grade classes at Tarsus Fevzi Çakmak Primary School, 6/C was chosen and 10 students were randomly chosen from this class. The case group was administered a questionnaire at the beginning of the study to see the CT preferences of the participants.During the study, critical thinking was infused into the curriculum through designing the lesson plans in accordance with the language content and topics for the 6th grades determined by the Ministry of Education. The study was based on task-based learning however task-based learning was considered as an umbrella term. The lessons were based on the tasks requiring learners to use critical thinking skills. These lessons were video recorded and transcribed. The researcher and two of her colleagues observed the students critical thinking skills through watching the videos. Each month, a Critical Thinking Scoring Rubric was used to assess the CT skills development of the participants. At the end of the study, the same questionnaire used at the beginning of the study was administered again to see whether there has been an improvement in learners? CT skills. Quantitative data was analyzed by using descriptive statistics as a component of case study. Research findings from qualitative data shed light on the efficacy of the use of tasks under the heading of task-based learning in improving critical thinking skills of 6th grade students.Key words: Critical Thinking, Task-based learning