Examining the relationship between critical and creative thinking skills of middle school students

The main purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between critical thinking skills and creative thinking skills of middle school students. The study group of this research, which was designed with the relational survey model, was determined by simple random sampling from random sampling methods, and the participants consisted of 332 students studying in Tutak district of Ağrı province in the 2023-2024 academic year. Analytical Critical Thinking Rubric for Narrative Texts, Creative Thinking Task for Children and Personal Information Form were used to collect data. Frequency, percentage, t-test, one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA), Pearson product-moment correlation analysis, Cronbach's alpha analysis, multiple linear regression analysis and simple linear regression analysis were used to analyze the data obtained as a result of the research. As a result of the study, while age, grade level, number of children, monthly income level, number of books read per month, and doing sports did not have a significant effect on middle school students' critical thinking skills, gender, parental education level, number of siblings, Turkish academic score, number of books read per year, number of pages of books read per week, playing a musical instrument, drawing, artistic and cultural activities, daily internet and social media usage time, and the most popular activities on the internet had a significant effect. Gender, grade level, father's education, number of children, Turkish course academic score, number of books read per year, playing a musical instrument, painting, participation in artistic and cultural activities, daily internet use, social media usage time, and the activities most frequently done on the internet have a significant effect on creative thinking skills. Age, mother's education level, number of siblings, monthly income level, number of books read per month, number of pages read per week, and sports participation do not have a significant effect on creative thinking. As a result of the correlation analysis, it was determined that critical thinking skills had a moderate positive relationship with creative thinking skills and critical thinking skills positively and significantly predicted creative thinking skills. It was determined that the total score of critical thinking skills positively and significantly predicted the dimensions of originality, divergent thinking, elaboration and fluency. As a result of the analysis of the prediction of the sub-dimensions of critical thinking skills to the sub-dimensions of creative thinking skills, it was determined that the definition, interpretation, analysis and assumption dimension predicted the originality dimension; the definition, interpretation and analysis dimension predicted the divergent thinking dimension; the definition dimension predicted the elaboration dimension; the definition and analysis dimension predicted the fluency dimension positively and significantly, and the explanation dimension predicted fluency negatively and significantly.