Evaluation of geography instruction in terms of geographical thinking skills in the public high schools of Adana central districts

Approaches in teaching geography have been chnaging as the result of rapidly developments in science, technology and communication sistems. Geography which is aimed to inquire reasons as geographical events is taught in schools today as memorisation of geographical foets not reasons beyond geographical events. It is very important to teach students "what" and "why" of geographical events, in another words geographical thinking skills. Our society and educational system need citizens who are educated as individual producing knowledge nd thinking independetly. The main purpose of this study is to evaluate geography instruction in terms of geographical thinking skills in teh public high schools. In another words, how public high school geography teachers teach geographical thinking skills to students. This study is a discriptive survey study. The population of the study was all geography teachers who work in the public high schools of central districts of Adana, Seyhan and Yüreğir. The population concerted of 78 geography teachers, all of them were selected as the sample. In addition, six high schools were selected randomly from out of all high schools in central district of Adana and 220 students were chosen from these six high schools as the students sample of the study. A questionnaire which was developed bye the researcher was administred to sample teachers and the studends. In addition on interview has been made with the 16 teachers who were selected randomly from the sample.IV opinions vegarding teaching geographical thinking skills, independent samples t test was applied. In data collected by using interview was used in the discussion of the results. As results, it has been determinoal that geographical thinking skills were tought "sometimes" in terms of teachers opinions and " rorely" in terms of students opinions, Its found that "asking geographical questions" skill was the mostly used thinking skill in geographical instruction in terms of both teachers and students opinions. It has been found signiicant differences between teachers and students opinions in teaching geographical thinking skills. Key words: Geographical Thinking, Teaching Geography, Secondary Education, Thinking Skills and Geography.