Akdeniz Üniversitesi İngilizce Öğretmenliği Bölümünde mitoloji tabanlı eleştirel düşünme etkinlikleri ile eleştirel düşünme becerisinin geliştirilmesi

Becoming more and more interesting lately, critical thinking has been the subject of many studies both in Turkey and abroad. The common aim of the studies is to determine different ways of improving critical thinking skills. Similarly, the present study aims to make a contribution to education by investigating the use of mythological short stories and critical thinking activities. In this quasi-experimental study, 39 freshman students taking Oral Communication Skills II course in the Department of English Language Teaching (hereafter ELT) at Akdeniz University constitute the research group. One-Group Pretest-Posttest design was adopted as the research design. The quantitative data were gathered through the Cornell Critical Thinking Level Z Test (pre-test). After the implementation of a five-week (10 hours in total) mythology-based critical thinking activities, Cornell Critical Thinking Test Level Z (post-test) was used again to see whether there was a difference between pre and posttest scores of the students. The analysis of the results indicated that the difference between the pretest and posttest mean scores was statistically significant. Based on the results taken from Cornell Critical Thinking Test, it can, therefore, be concluded that after the implementation, there is an improvement in the critical thinking levels of the students as a whole. Interestingly, even though students boosted their test scores in five out of seven subskills, no statistically significant difference between the pretest and posttest mean scores was found in these subskills. Another issue emerging from the findings is that there was no significant relationship between students' scores in the critical thinking test and individual characteristics such as age and educational level of their parents.