DEVELOPMENT OF CRITICAL THINKING IN FUTURE TEACHERS OF PRESCHOOL AND PRIMARY EDUCATION

Currently, one of the main competences to be acquired by university students is critical thinking. It is pointed out that the student of the Degree in Preschool Education and Degree in Primary Education must train to “analyze and incorporate in a critical way the most relevant issues of society”. Several investigations have highlighted the difficulties of university students in making use of this competence to solve a problem or make informed decisions. A large amount of information related to socio-scientific issues reach us from the media and publicity, but sometimes this information is unscientific and contradictory. Thus, it results necessary to carry out didactic experiences in class not only to learn contents but also to think, to debate and clarify topics of socio-scientific interest.
In order to contribute to this objective and taking into account the importance of nutrition in people´s health, we have developed a sequence of activities to promote critical thinking in relation to the influence of advertisements in people´s diets. They are based on a previous questionnaire that gave us information on knowledge, habits and attitudes versus certain food myths and the questionnaire C.R.I.T.I.C. (Bartz, 2002) along with the contributions of Paul and Elder (2005). Our preliminary data shows that teachers of early childhood and primary education do not spend time to analyze food labeling to know what they eat and advertising affects and determine the choice of food. After the implementation of the didactic sequence, students have managed to develop critical thinking and are more aware of the need to use this competence in their daily lives.