Critical thinking while teaching social science:evaluation of practiced critical thinking activities for teaching social science to 5th grade

This research is planned as a scanning model to determine what kind of activities used and what kind of problems encountered by teachers while improving critical thought during teaching social sciences to 5 grade in 2007-2008 education year.Semi-structured interview form and Questionnaire used for exposing these activities and problems. Teachers opinions gathered by using 5 point likert poll and semi-structured interview is used to support poll?s data and to increase validty of informations given by teachers .During the interview speeches were recorded by getting teachers premission to prevent data loss.The datas are defined and loaded to SPSS programme to offer proposals by fixing problems with the help of information obtained during the research.The first part consists of personal informations.For the first 4 questions,descriptive analysis is applied as a statistical tecnique in analysing polls?s datas.For the other questions? analysis,unilateral variation analysis of parametric testes and LSD test are used.The second part of poll has 4 subheadings.In the analysing poll?s datas, the place of activities part which is about critical thoughts activities in the social sciences programme that is second part of poll is divided in to two factors.The first part called as a leraning role and the second part named psychological safety in the classroom atmosphere.The improving critical thoughts activities part in the teaching social sciences is observing by dividing into 4 factors.The name of first part is Active Participation Learning,second part is Construction Learning,third part is Teacher Centered Learning and forth part is Modelling Learning.The part of problems encountered while improving critical thinking abilities in teaching social sciences is divided into two subheadings.The first part is named as a Classroom Atmosphere while second part is Content of Activity. Evaluation of critical thinking abilty part has a just factor as a name of evaluation.Summary of findings as a result of research;1.Teachers express theirs problems about teaching social sciences by the way of critical thinking such as unsuitability for students level?, `inadequate materials?, `inefficient time?.2.Teachers don?t use any other activities except from critical thoughts activity.3.Teachers have some difficulties while evaluating activities like that practice room,time and ecomonic cost?4.As a result of research there isn?t any differences among teachers problems except from classroom atmosphere part?s subheadings when you compare them in the view of classroom atmosphere,seniorty,school?s socio-economic level and number of students.In the view of this search?s datas there are some practice proposals such as developing a curriculum experts should take in to consideration the problems about critical thinking ability activities .The teachers have great responsibility to bring in critical thinking ability to students.Therefore Service Training course should be organized for these teachers.They ought to participate the courses for classroom management,critical thinking ability and cirricilum?s targets.