An investigation on the relationship between education faculty students' thinking styles and their need for cognition

The present study aims to investigate the relationship between students' thinking styles and need for cognition at education faculty by also investigating the effects of gender, department, study year, financial status of the family, city of residence on this relationship. The research data was collected with the selection of the sample which consists of 820 students studying at Gaziantep Education Faculty in 2014-2015, Fall Term. "Thinking Styles Scale" (Sternberg & Wagner, 1992), adapted to Turkish by Buluş (2005), was used to measure thinking styles of teacher candidates. The data related to the need for cognition were collected by "Need For Cognition Scale (NFCS)" (Cacioppo & Petty, 1982; adapted to Turkish by Gülgöz & Sadowski, 1996), and lastly, the data related to the personal information of the students were gathered by "Personal Information Form" which was designed by the researcher. The raw data obtained from the scales were analysed by using SPSS 20. Major analyses conducted include Pearson Product Moment Correlation, t-test, and one-way ANOVA. According to the results, teacher candidates mostly take the role of judicator while they do not prefer the role of conservative in terms of thinking styles. It was also found that there is a positive relationship between their thinking styles and need for cognition, and there are significant differences in terms of gender and department. However, there is no significant difference in terms of study year, income, and residence. Key words: Thinking styles, Need for cognition