The investigation of teacher candidates? thinking style profiles in terms of various variables

The aim of this study is to investigate thinking styles of freshmen and senior teacher candidates from the departments of Mathematics, Social Sciences, Classroom Teaching at Primary School Education and English Teaching department in terms of various variables. In this study, correlational research method was performed.The universe of this study consist of 933 freshmen and senior teacher candidates from four deparments of Buca Educational Faculty in 2008?2009 academic year. The sample consists of total 339 teacher candidates in accordance with the dispersion of the universe by random sampling method.Sternberg-Wagner (1992) Thinking Styles Inventory, whose reliability and validity studies were performed by Buluş (2005), employed as data gathering instrument in the study. In addition, personal information form including questions about students? demografic characteristics was used. Teacher candidates? cumulative grade points were obtained from student affairs office.In data analysis, arithmetic means, standart deviation, t-test, one-way analysis of variance, Kruskal Wallis tests, Man Witney-U and Pearson correlation analysis were employed.According to the findings of the study, it was observed that teacher candidates prefered legislative, hiyerarchic, judical and liberal styles the most and conservative, oligarchic, local and global styles the least.Teacher candidates? prefered thinking styles had a significant difference in terms of department, class, gender, age, high school graduate, perception of socio-economic status. It was observed that there was a low and negative relation between teacher candidates? global and conservative thinking styles and academic grade point average.KEYWORDS; Thinking, Style, Thinking Style, Profile