The effect of various texts on 5th grade students' critical thinking levels

The aim of this study is to determine 'the effect of various texts on 5th grade students' critical thinking levels'. Critical thinking can be defined as analyzing for the individual to decide what to do and what to believe, making conscious judgments for evaluation and stating these judgments. Critical thinking has been valued and studied on at educational environments. The importance of critical thinking has been revealed by the researches conducted. Individuals thinking critically are those individuals who can query what takes place in the society, filter events, do not accept results obtained without questioning and investigate. The increase of number of such people in a society is an indicator that the society can think rationally in the light of science. In order to increase the number of people thinking critically, people are trying to apply critical thinking items and articles to their curriculum that can serve critical thinking. In this research, it has been aimed to reveal in what rate various types of reading text in secondary 5th grade Turkish books effect sub-skills of critical thinking. This research has been planned and conducted as a descriptive study. The study group of the research comprises of 75 fifth grade students of Rauf Denktaş Secondary school located at Kayseri. The data was collected via using the open-ended test questions wh,ch were formulate by the researcher. Development of data collecting device is based on six sub-skills of critical thinking (interpretation, analyze, evaluation, inference, explanation and self-regulation). During data collecting process, the students were given two texts of each type, informative, narrative and poetry, and demanded to answer seven open-ended questions for each article. Each answer was graded between the ranges of 1-3 considering six sub-dimensional critical thinking. The collected data was analyzed using one-way variance analysis and post-hoc Bonferroni test. According to the findings, critical thinking scores of participants in general do not differ significantly according to the type of text given. But, sub-skill scores of critical thinking differ among scores obtained from different text types. Thus, partitipants obtained the highest interpretation and evaluation scores at poems, the highest analysis, inference and explanation scores at informative text and the highest self-regulation score at narrative text.