An investigation of critical thinking and empathy levels of the students at the school of physical education and sports and the faculty of science

The purpose of this research was to examine the level of critical thinking and empathy of students who attended physical education sports college and science faculty and to show the difference between these two variables. In the research, a method for descriptive and relational scanning aimed at revealing the current situation has been used. The research consists of two phases. In the first phase of the research, the students' attitudes toward critical thinking and empathy levels of students studying at physical education and sport colleges and those studying at the science faculty; In the second phase, the relationship between science faculty and physical education and sports college students' attitudes toward critical thinking and empathy was determined in accordance with the relational screening model. The universe of the research is constituted by the students who attended Bartın University in 2017-2018 academic year. A total of 673 (n (male) = 362, n (female) = 311) were selected by chance cluster sampling method in the Faculty of Physical Education and Sports and Science Faculty in 2017-2018 academic year. The "Personal Information Form" developed by the researcher, the "Critical Thinking Tendency Scale" developed by Semerci (2003) and the Empathic Tendency Scale (EEÖ) developed by Dökmen (1988) were used as data collection tools in the research. In the analysis of the data, the frequency and percentage distributions describing the participants' personal characteristics were extracted, and the arithmetic mean and standard deviation of the answers given to the scales were calculated and the distributions related to critical thinking tendencies and empathy levels were determined. Independent variables related to sub problems; Critical thinking and empathy levels were tested with parametric tests, t test for binary comparisons, and One-way ANOVA for three or more cluster comparisons. Tukey HSD multiple comparison test was used because of the homogeneity of the variances to determine the source of significant differences found in the ANOVA outcome. The Pearson Moments Multiplication Correlation (r) Coefficient technique was used to reveal the relationship between participants' critical thinking tendencies and empathy levels. The level of significance in the analyzes was taken as 0.05. According to the results of the research, when the variables such as gender, active sporting situation (Science Faculty), book reading habit, income level are taken into account, it is concluded that the empathic tendency leads to significant differentiation in terms of total scores. While the students' tendency to think critically was significantly different from the variables of metacognition, flexibility and systematization, there was a statistically significant difference in the mean of critical thinking tendency and flexibility subscale scores in terms of faculty change. In addition, a statistically significant relationship was found between the mean scores of the empathic tendency scale and the critical thinking tendency scale subscales in positive and low levels in terms of the data obtained from the research group.