Examining the relationship between thinking styles and problem solving skills in classroom teachers

The aim of this study is to investigate the relationship between thinking styles and problem solving skills in primary school teachers. In order to investigate the relationship between the variables, descriptive design based on relational screening model was used in this study. The sample of the study consisted of 200 primary school teachers working in Ağrı. The number of participants dropped to 171 after data cleanup. The age of the participants ranged from 21 to 62 years. The mean age of the participants in the sample was 28.913 and the standard deviation was calculated as 6.801. 38.6% of the participants were male and 57.9% were female teachers. 6 participants did not indicate their gender. KBF, DSO and PCE were used as data collection tools within the scope of the research. The data analysis process was carried out in two stages: In the first stage, the relationship between thinking styles and problem solving skills in terms of descriptive statistics and socio-demographic variables were examined. The relationship between the problem-solving and thinking styles of the participants in terms of socio-demographic variables was examined for independent samples through t-test (independent-samples t-test), because all the independent variables consisted of two categories. In the second stage, the relationship between thinking styles and problem solving skills was investigated through Pearson correlation analysis. All analyzes were analyzed with SPSS 25 and 0.05 significance level. Research results show that primary school teachers mostly use executive and legislative thinking styles. It was observed that the lowest point average is conservative thinking style. At the same time, the conservative thinking style, which is the least preferred style of thinking, has brought the tradition to the forefront in their works. According to gender variable, the results of analysis showed no significant difference in thinking styles, whereas primary school teachers' problem-solving skills differed by gender. Moreover, in the thinking styles of the participants, only marital status, and seniority year and age factor differentiations were created in the dimension of anarchy. According to the results of the correlation analysis about whether there is a significant relationship between the thinking styles and problem solving skills of the primary school teachers, which are the main problem sentences of the research, it was seen that the problem solving skills of the participants were significantly correlated with only the monarchic thinking style. According to the result, it can be said that the teachers with high level of monarchical thinking have high problem solving skills.