High school students? thinking styles

The aim of this study is to investigate the relation between thinking styles of high school students in Karacasu district of Aydın in terms of their school type, branch and academic achievement. In this study, correlational research method was performed.The population of this study consists of 745 high school students from Karacasu district of Aydın in 2008?2009 academic year. Realibity and validity studies of the Thinking Style Scale was accomplished with the participation of 224 students. Due to the limited number of students, the sample selection was not done. The sample constitudes of 476 high school students.Sternberg-Wagner?s (1992) Thinking Styles Inventory, which its reliability and validity studies were performed by Buluş (2005), employed as data gathering instrument in the study. In addition, personal information form including questions about students? demografic characteristics was used. Students? cumulative grade points were obtained from school administration. In data analysis, means, standart deviation, t-test, one-way analysis of variance, Kruskal Wallis tests, Man Witney-U and Pearson correlation analysis were employed.Findings demonstrated that students prefered legislative, hiyerarchic, and liberal styles the most and conservative, local and global styles the least. High school students prefered thinking styles had a significant difference in terms of high school type, gender, age, branch, class, frequency of playing mind games. It was observed that there was a low and positive relation between academic achievement and legislative and executive thinking styles and also a low and negative relation between global and conservative thinking styles