Preperation, implementation and evaluation of critical thinking skill curriculum

Thinking is the most important tool of mankind to understand and make sense of life and world. Thinking act directs many characteristics even it seems so ordinary. Speaking, discussion, making a choice or a judgement are all under the control of thinking activity. All people think inherently. But they think prejudicedly, deficiently, incorrectly and based on inexpedient information if they don't gain effective thinking skills. However, today, information society whose improvement is based on information and communication technologies demands autonomous individuals. These individuals are able to understand knowledge which he/she faces inquiringly, make free decisions without taking hold of others and take different approaches to events. At this point in the 21th century, mankind should constitute an elimination system for the perceived information. The mental process fulfills logical filter duty through critical thinking. Critical thinking is defined by the skill of taking the responsibility of individuals' own ideas. In this study, the aim was to prepare, implement and evaluate the critical thinking skill curriculum for 5th grade students. On the other hand, another aim was to teach critical thinking as a separate course instead of integrating into another course and to evaluate that critical thinking strategy. In this study, the sequential embedded design, which is a kind of mixed methods research designs, was used. Qualitative and quantitative methods were embedded into action research method and by this way having an explicit view towards skill based critical thinking instruction was aimed. In this study, the quantitative data were obtained by pretest-posttest experimental method. The study group of this research consists of 12 fifth grade classrooms in six secondary schools located in Afyonkarahisar city center in 2015-2016 academic years. The pilot study of critical thinking instruction curriculum was conducted in three fifth grade classrooms, and the pilot study of critical thinking skill test was conducted in other three fifth grade classrooms. In one of these classes, both pilot study of critical thinking instruction curriculum and critical thinking skill test were conducted. In three of these classes, the validity and reliability studies of critical thinking skill test was conducted, and, in two of these classes, main implementation was conducted. Eventually, a statistically significant development was found in critical thinking skills, levels of critical thinking self-evaluation, reflective thinking skills, levels of democratic attitude and total scores of critical thinking skill of experimental group. At the same time, there was not a statistically significant development in critical thinking skills of the control group. Also, gain scores that were obtained from critical thinking skill test of experimental and control group indicated a statistically significant difference on behalf of the experimental group. Keywords: Critical thinking, skill-based instruction, curriculum development.