The relationship between critical thinking tendency and practical perceptions of the middle school mathematics teachers

The purpose of this study is to determine the relationship between critical thinking tendencies and critical thinking teaching practices of middle-school mathematics teachers.The sample of the study consists of 381 secondary school mathematics teachers selected with appropriate sampling technique among the non-random sampling methods among 852 secondary school mathematics teachers working in Düzce, Karabük, Çorum and Kastamonu provinces.Critical Thinking Tendency Scale and Critical Thinking Teaching Practice Level Scale were used as data collection tools in research.Data collection tools were applied to the research sample in the first semester of the 2019-2020 academic year. The data obtained from the research were analyzed in SPSS 25.00 package program.Independent Sample T-Test, One Way Variance Analysis, Correlation Analysis and Multiple Linear Regression Analysis were used to analyze the data.According to the results of the research, it has been observed that there is a positive meaningful relationship between the critical thinking disposition levels and the critical thinking teaching practice levels. According to the results of there, research, it is seen that the critical thinking tendencies of mathematics teachers are very high.There was no significant difference in the critical thinking tendency of the teachers according to gender, the place where the school is located, whether to choose their profession voluntarily and to be satisfied with their profession, but a significant difference was found according to the variables of seniority and education. It has been observed that teachers' critical thinking teaching practices are veryhigh. There was no significant difference in teachers' critical thinking teaching practices according to location and satisfaction variables, but significant differences were found according togender, seniority, volunteering, and education. Finally, the power of teachers' metacognition, flexibility, systematicity, perseverance, patience and open-mindedness scores, which are the sub-dimensions of critical thinking disposition scale, to investigate critical thinking teaching practices were in vestigated. It is concluded that metacognition, perseverance, patience and open-mindedness variables are significant predictors of critical thinking teaching practices.