Critical thinking dispositions of high school students according to their learning styles

The purpose of this research is to determine the learning styles of high school students and to investigate their critical thinking dispositions according to their learning styles. It is investigated whether critical thinking dispositions are differing significantly according to students? type of schools and genders or not, by using statical ways.In this study the descriptive method was used. The sample of this research consists of 700 10th grade high school students who were attending the high schools in Bornova in İzmir. The students who were selected by using stratfied sampling method.Thus, each type of high schools is supposed different stratfied.In order to determine the Learning Styles of the students ?BIG 16 Learning Styles Inventory?, which is developed by Nurettin ŞİMŞEK in 2002 was applied. In order to determine Critical Thinking Dispositions of the students ?(CCTDI) California Critical Thinking Disposition Inventory? which was translated by Doğan KÖKDEMİR in 2003 was applied.The data was analyzed with means of SPSS 15.0 Windows package software. In data analysis, frequency and percentage, arithmetic means, standard deviation, chi-square, independent sample t-test, oneway analysis of variance (ANOVA) and crosstabs were applied.The findings of this research can be summarized as follows:1.It is found that students generally prefer visual learning style.2.It is found that critical thinking dispositions of students are generally mid-level.3.It is found that there is not a meaningful relationship between students? critical thinking dispositions and their learning styles.4.It is found that there is a difference between kinesthetic learners? critical thinking dispositions according to their genders. It is found that the critical thinking dispositions of aural, visual and multi-modal learners? don?t differ according to their gender.5.It is found that there is a difference between kinesthetic learners? critical thinking dispositions according to their type of schools. It is found that the critical thinking dispositions of aural, visual and multi-modal learners? don?t differ according to their type of schools.Key words: learning, learning styles, thinking, critical thinking dispositions