Analysis of the critical thinking attitudes and the principles of professional ethics perceived of prospective teachers

The main purpose of this research is to identify any difference in prospective teachers' critical thinking attitudes and their perceived professional ethical principles with regards to independent variables (gender, department, class level, socio-economical level and parental education level), In addition to this goal this research also aims to assess the relation between their critical thinking attitudes and their perceived professional ethical principles of prospective teachers'. The descriptive research uses the relational screening model and its population consists from students who are studying in the Cukurova University Faculty of Education. The data have been gathered with three surveys: "Personal Data Form" developed by the researcher, "Critical Thinking Attitude Survey" developed by Özelçi (2012) and "Survey of Professional Ethical Principles" developed by Manolova (2011). This data have been analyzed by SPSS 17.0 statistical package software. The analysis consists from Mann Whitney-U, Kruskal Wallis and Pearson Moment correlational analysis techniques. The research had found out that: 1. There is a significant and positive relationship between critical thinking attitudes and perceived professional ethical principles of the prospective teachers. 2. Prospective teachers' critical thinking attitudes: - Do not differentiate significantly with regards to gender, class and mother's educational level. - Do differentiate significantly with regards to their department of study and the context of overall points, and does favor "English Teaching" and "Turkish Teaching" than other departments. - Don't differentiate significantly with regards to the overall points by the socio-economical level but had found "Low" socio-economical level differentiates significantly from "Middle" with regards to subfactors of "Openness to finding reasons" and "Making inferences" and favoring the latter. - Do differentiate significantly with regards to the educational level of the father when the points from the survey are taken into account with the points taken from the sub surveys of "Willingness to gather data" and "Deciding with evidence". Those whose fathers have the educational level of "Not able to read or write" has the lowest attitude regarding critical thinking. The overall points created by the survey had shown that a significant difference was seen between whose fathers have the "Primary School" and "High School" educational level and "Graduate" educational level favoring the latter. 3. The perceived professional ethical principles of the prospective teachers: - Do differentiate significantly with regards to gender and favors "female" students with the context of points gathered in the overall survey and the sub survey points. - Don't differentiate significantly with class, department of study, and mother's educational level. - Don't differentiate significantly with the exception of Professional Ethical Principles regarding School sub survey. When the data is analysed from this sub survey, there is a significant difference favoring "Middle" socio-economical level. - Do differentiate significantly with the father's educational level with the context of overall survey and sub surveys of Professional Ethical Principles towards Society, Profession, Colleagues and Students. The data gathered by the overall survey and the sub surveys had shown a significant difference between those whose fathers have "Primary School", "Middle School" and "High School" and "Graduate" favoring the latter. Keywords: Critical thinking, attitude towards critical thinking, ethics, professional ethics, prospective teacher.