The teachers' usage level of the suggested activities for teaching students the crictical thinking skills in primary education third class life science course: The example of Siirt

The principal function of education foundations is protect and develop person?s higher order thinking skills. Primary education is the principal education level that tries to attain Turkish Education System?s general aims. Life Science Course is the pioneer and the principal lesson that includes active citizenship education. Also, critical thinking skills such as higher order thinking skills are tried to be acquired via the activites in this lesson. If this process turns out to be productive, a person thanks to this critical thinking skills can easily keep in step with the age against the rapid inceasing and changing information.This study aims to describe the third class teachers? who are applying 2005 Primary Education curriculum in Life Science Course practising level of the suggested education experiences in the curriculum for developing critical thinking and the problems encountered in this process.The study is designed to include questionnaire and interview techniques with survey method. From this reason , mixed method is used which includes consecutively quantitative and qualitative models.The population of the study is composed of the third class primary education teachers who are working in borough center in Siirt in 2010-2011 educational of year. The sample of the study is composed of 105 third class primary education teachers working in 50 primary schools choosen randomly by cluster sampling out of 65 primary school located in the borough center of Siirt. With the data of the questionnaire results, 10 people are interviewed. Typical case sampling was used for data collection.Datas are handled with the questionnaire developed by the researcher. Teachers are determined according to the qualities of the questionnaire datas. Questionnaire questions are prepared for describing the datas attained with the questionnaire. Descriptive statistic techniques are used in analyzing quantitative datas ( frequency, percentage, arithmetical mean, standart deviation), chi square test; content analysis is used in analyzing qualitative datas. As a result, it is found that third class primary school teachers are mostly using ?lecture? method among the suggested techniques in 2005 curriculum for developing critical thinking in Life Sciences Course. Moreover, it is found that ?question-answer? technique is mostly used and ?reasoning and activities based on problem solving? is frequently used among the suggested techniques in the curriculum. On the other hand, it is found that teachers are mostly using ?student and work books? among the suggested materials. It seen that ?short answer questions? are mostly used in evaulating critical thinking abilities. Also, the most encountered problem is ?the parents? irrelevance?.