Investigation of class teachers' thinking styles through the methods they used and epistemological beliefs

The aim of this study is to investigate the effects of the thinking styles of the class teachers, the methods and techniques of teaching and assessment and evaluation which they use, their epistemological beliefs and the relations of these variables with each other. In the study, relational survey model was used. The study population consists of class teachers who were on duty in 2012-2013 academic year in Amasya and the sample constitute of 375 class teachers. With the aim of data collection, "Thinking Styles Scale" which was developed by Sternberg-Wagner (1992) and whose validity and reliability studies were conducted by Buluş (2005) in Turkish, and for the identification of epistemological beliefs "Epistemological Belief Scale" which was developed by Schommer (1998) and adapted by Karhan (2005) in Turkish were utilized. Besides, personal information form that was prepared by the researcher and the form which was aimed to determine the methods and techniques of teaching and assessment and evaluation, which were used by the teachers, were also utilized. Descriptive analyses, independent sample t-test,oneway analysis of variance, pearson correlation, chi-squared analyses were used for the data analytics. According to the findings of the study, class teachers had mostly legislative, executive and hierarchical, etc. thinking styles as well as the most conservative, global and local thinking styles. Thinking styles did not differentiate in terms of gender, occupational seniority and graduation branch. Class teachers used at most the question-answer and expression method and at least station, six thinking hats and analogy methods from the teaching methods and techniques. They used mostly multiple-choice and short answered, gap-filling questions; the ones at least or never used were identified as being crossword, diary, structured grid and diagnostic tree. When the epistemological beliefs, which were one of the variables of study, were inspected, it was seen that the class teachers had mostly a matured understanding of science, despite of the fact that they partially had a conventional understanding of science. When the relations between thinking styles and other variables were examined, there were not any methods and techniques of teaching and assessment and evaluation in which any certain thinking style was used dominantly. There were only meaningful relations between some thinking styles and methods of assessment and evaluation. It was also found that thinking styles were related to the epistemological beliefs positively from weak aspect. There were weak or medium level meaningfull relationships between subdimensions of thinking styles and subdimensions of epistemologic views. Keywords: Thinking styles, epistomologic views, class teacher, teaching methods and techniques, assessment and evaluation methods and techniques