The analysis of the relation between critical thinking and decision making strategies of school administrators:The sample of Maltepe district)

By this study, the relation between the tendency of the critical thinking and decision making strategies of school administrators was examined. During the study conducted with the school administrators in Maltepe district in Istanbul, a relational scanning model was used instead of a sampling model in order to reach the whole universe. Individual information forms, The Scale of Critical Thinking Tendency and The Scale of Decision Making Strategies which were designed by the researcher in order to get data were used for the study which was conducted with totally 226 school administrators, 59 of which were school headmasters, 167 of which were chief headmaster assistants. At the analysis phase of the study, the normality of the ranges were controlled and independent one-sample t test, one-way analysis of variance, ANOVA for normal range; non-parametric Mann Whitney-U test and nonparametric Kruskal Wallis-H test for non-normal range; Pearson?s product moment correlation analysis for the comparison between two scales. The significance level was tested 0.5, and the other levels were indicated on the related charts. According to the results of the study, it was observed that the tendency of the school administrators? critical thinking was low. Despite this fact, the highest tendency observed at the sub-dimension of broadmindedness while the lowest tendency was observed at the sub-dimension of systematicity. With regards to decision making strategies, it was observed that the school administrators that used the most sensible decision making strategies applied the least indecisive decision making strategies. Meanwhile, it was tested whether the tendency of critical thinking and decision making was tested according to gender, age, level of education, job, specialty, school type, status, the period of service, the period of administration, the number of in-service education, level of income, demographic variables, the relation between the strategies of critical thinking decision making was analyzed and it was reached that there was a positive relation between the tendency of critical thinking and the strategy of making sensible decision, Keywords: administraiton, thinking, critical thinking, the strategies of decision makin