The relationship between candidates of science teachers'thinking styles, problem solving perceptions, creative thinkings and critical thinking trends

Problem solving, critical thinking and creative thinking skills, which are identified as 21st century skills, have an important place not only in business life but also in education. Determining the status of the students in terms of these skills and developing these skills are among the most basic requirements of the science teaching program. The aim of this research is to examine some basic skills that should be present in science teachers and prospective teachers, whose failures are expressed in many studies, in order to increase their success in science courses and to become science literate individuals. In this study, the relationship between gender and grade level variables was examined statistically for prospective science teachers' thinking styles, problem solving perceptions, creative thinking and critical thinking dispositions. This research is a descriptive - relational study in the survey model to determine the current situation. The study sample included 156 female and 57 male comprises a total of 213 prospective science teachers who studied in the 2010 and 2011 academic year in Sakarya and Istanbul Universities in the education faculty of science teacher, in third and fourth grades. In order to determine the thinking styles of science teacher candidates, "Thinking Styles Scale" which was adapted to Turkish by Buluş (2006) and validated for reliability and validity was used; in order to determine problem solving skills, "Problem Solving Inventory" which was developed by Heppner and Peterson (1982) and adapted to Turkish by Şahin, Şahin and Heppner (1993) was used; "Torrance Creative Thinking Test Shape Test (A) Form" was used to determine their creative thinking and finally, for the determination of critical thinking tendencies, the "California Critical Thinking Disposition Inventory" which was translated into Turkish by Kökdemir (2003) and validated for reliability and validity was used. Descriptive statistics, correlation coefficients and regression calculations are given in tables in the findings section. According to the analysis made in the research; the thinking styles of the sample is seen that the legislative style in terms of functions, hierarchical style in terms of form, local style in terms of level, inner style in terms of scope and creative style in terms of tendencies is more preferred; it was seen that the sub-dimension of the thinking styles which had the highest scores in terms of both the grade level and gender variable was the legislative thinking style and the lowest scores was conservative thinking style. In addition, according to the problem solving perception of the sample, there was no significant difference according to the gender variable and it was seen that the 3rd grade students had lower level of problem solving perception in terms of grade level. There was no significant difference in terms of creative thinking according to gender and grade level variables. On the other hand, it was found that there was no significant difference in terms of critical thinking tendencies in terms of gender variable, but it was found that prospective teachers in 4th grade had higher scores compared to grade level variable. Conclusions, discussions and suggestions regarding the research are given in the last section.