Critical thinking skills of education faculty students and factors influencing critical thinking skills.

The aim of this research was to determine the factors that affect critical thinking skills of teacher candidates in the faculty of education. For that reason, we investigated interrelations between critical thinking skills of teacher candidates and lower dimensions of critical thinking with respect to variables such as the department, sex, class, teaching types, mother?s education, father?s education, mother?s occupation, father?s occupation, level of family income, school type that student graduated, age and academic average. This study is a descriptive field research focussed on finding out interrelations. The Cornell Critical Thinking Test was used to measure critical thinking skills of students. While analizing the data derivated from research, SPSS 13.00 package programme was used. In order to determine either being or lacking of a meaningful difference about derivated data, ?t? test was used for dual variabled characteristics and F test was used for multiple variabled characteristics. In the light of F test results emerged, the Tukey test was used to determine the source of the meaningfulness amongst the groups. While analyzing the relation between critical tkinking skills and causes affected those skills, Pearson Correlation coefficient was measured. With regard to the survey data, the students appeared to not to have sufficient critical thinking skills. Critical thinking skills of female students appeared to have beeen higher than the male students. A meaningful difference was not evident amongst the departments in the faculty of education. Concerning variables such as occupation and education level of father and mother, a statistically meaningful difference was not observed over the critical thinking skills of students. First-Instruction (Day-time instruction) students were found to be more successful in critical thinking skills than those of students taught in Second-Instruction (Eveningtime instruction) classes. Survey data revealed that the age and class level of students did not seem to influence the critical thinking skills of the students. The students who have high academic average appeared to have been good at critical thinking skills in comparison to those of students with lower academic average.