Investigation of mathematical critical thinking skills of elementary school mathematics teacher candidates

People are preoccupied with mental processes such as reasoning, analyzing and making decisions in the problems they encounter. While critical thinking includes these processes, it is disciplined and self-controlled thinking that aims to obtain information and question its reliability, make comparisons and evaluate it. Critical thinking, which is one of the 21st century skills that is related to high-level cognitive processes such as problem solving and posing, reasoning, and which is aimed to be acquired by students, is important because it enables to deal with problems effectively. In this respect, the conceptualization and evaluation of critical thinking specific to the field of mathematics is important in terms of mathematics education. Since the critical thinking skills of the teachers will affect the critical thinking skills of the students, knowing the mathematics-specific critical thinking skills of mathematics teacher candidates is considered important in terms of shedding light on the studies on the development of this skill. In this context, the aim of this study is to examine the mathematical critical thinking skills of elementary school mathematics teacher candidates. First of all, the "Mathematical Critical Thinking Test (MCTT)", developed by Rott and Leuders in 2016 in order to measure mathematical critical thinking skills, was adapted into Turkish to achieve the aim of the research. In order to determine the intelligibility of the items translated into Turkish, interviews were conducted with three elementary school mathematics teacher candidates. Then, the reliability of the test was determined with 52 elementary school mathematics teacher candidates. It has been determined that MCTT is a reliable test and can be used to measure mathematical critical thinking skills. The study to determine the mathematical critical thinking skills of elementary school mathematics teacher candidates was carried out with 90 elementary school mathematics teacher candidates. Interviews were conducted with five students selected from the low, medium and high level groups, which were formed according to the scores of the participants. As a result of the study, it was seen that the mathematical critical thinking skills of the elementary school mathematics teacher candidates were at a moderate level. In the light of these results, it can be recommended to develop measurement tools with higher reliability to measure mathematical critical thinking skills and to design, implement and evaluate environments to develop mathematical critical thinking skills.