Critical Thinking Dispositions of Social Studies Teacher Candidates

The main aim of this study is, to analyze critical thinking disposition of social studies teacher candidates. The study group is consisting of totally 250 teacher candidates voluntarily who are students of education faculty at social studies department in a state university. This study is used with descriptive survey method. The "Personal Information Form" was developed by the researchers used as data collection tools and The California Critical Thinking Disposition Inventory (CCTDI-R) which was developed by Facione, Facione, and Giancarlo (1998) and translated into Turkish by Kökdemir (2003) was used. Research data were analyzed with IBM SPSS 21.0 program. The independent samples t-test and One Way ANOVA were used for analyzing the datum. At the end of the study, it has been determined that in generally social studies teacher candidates have low level critical thinking disposition, obtained the average score related with subscales while the highest scores at the Analyticity subscale, the lowest average scores at Systematicity subscale. It has been seen that critical thinking disposition were not differentiated in terms of gender and class variables generally while significant differences were detected in the subscale dimensions. Some suggestions have been made in the light of these findings.