THE EFFECT OF PSYCHOLOGY COURSE ON CRITICAL THINKING LEVELS OF FIRST-YEAR STUDENTS IN THE DEPARTMENT OF PRESCHOOL TEACHING

Critical thinking is an active and organized thinking process through which we endeavor to understand ourselves and events around us by being aware of our own thinking processes, taking other people’s ideas into consideration and combining all available information. There are various reasons that require critical thinking. Among these reasons are to sustain and develop a democratic social culture and to eliminate prejudges and fanaticism. In communities where critical thinking is widely adopted, individuals are able to renew and improve themselves, and to look at events and others people’s ideas from a larger perspective, more tolerantly and without prejudices. Another reason behind the need for critical thinking is the rapid enhancement and change of knowledge. Due to the difficulty of presenting all this knowledge to students in education programmes, students are required to acquire critical thinking skills and to obtain the knowledge they need and the methods to interpret this knowledge. Teaching and learning environments should be designed in a way to develop creative and critical thinking skills of students so that they can acquire critical thinking skills and transfer these skills to their life. Particularly preschool age is a period of children’s life where they acquire positive life skills and hence critical thinking skills. The most important person that assures the acquisition of these skills is the teacher. That is why preschool teachers are required to have critical thinking skills.
The purpose of this study is to determine critical thinking level of first-year students in the department of preschool teaching, and to evaluate the effect of psychology course on this level. Thirty seven students that started the first year of the Department of Preschool Teaching in the Faculty of Education Sciences at Ankara University in the academic year 2009-2010 participated in this study. The data collection tool used for the purpose of this study was the California Critical Thinking Disposition Inventory (CCTDI) adapted to Turkish by Kökdemir (2003). A pretest and a posttest were applied in scale research. In addition to the classical programme content of the psychology course, homework and discussion topics that support critical thinking were used. The findings revealed that the critical thinking scores of the students that started preschool teaching programme were lower compared to subjects of similar studies in the literature ( =232.21). Although the students’ critical thinking scores increased after they received psychology course, this increase is not statistically significant (t(36)=.970, p>.05). It is important that prospective teachers receive a comprehensive training on critical thinking so that they can improve these skills.