Primary 4th and 5th grade science and technology education programs effects on students science process and critical thinking skills

This study was carried out to determine the effects on fourth and fifth grade students? science process and critical thinking skills in the Science And Technology Curriculum of the 2004. Work group of research consists of 319 students in Altıntaş town of Kütahya in 2010/2011 academic year. In this study, ?Science Process Skills Test? was used to explore the level of scientific process skills and ?Cornell Critical Thinking Test Level X? was employed to determine the level of critical thinking skills of the students. The tests were conducted on the students at the beginning and the end of the school year (pre-test and post-test periods) and it was searched if there is a meaningful difference between pre-test and post-test. In evaluating the results of the tests which were applied the students t-test was used for independent and paired samples and pearson correlation coefficient. The results of the tests were found out by using SPSS 17.0 statistic programme. In addition, the results from pre-test and post-test showed that, there is a statistical meaningful significance in students critical thinking skills whereas there is no statistical meaningful significance in science processing skills. When sub-skills were considered individually, there is a meaningful significance in the improvement of fourth grade students science process skills in inferring and modeling; however in vfifth grade students only modeling skills showed significance. There was also a statistical meaningful significance in fourth and fifth grade students' critical thinking skills in induction, deduction, supposition but there was no statistical significance in the observation and hypothesis skills.In all tests, except for fifth grade science process skills post-test mean score of female students higher than male students? averages. Moreover, it was found that there are positive and medium level relationship between science process skills and critical thinking skills of students.Key words: Science and technology programme, science process skills, critical thinking skill