Abstract:

Critical thinking, along with other skills, is included as a basic skill in the constructive education program that has been in use in Turkey since 2005. Therefore, a large increase has been observed in studies on critical thinking skills since 2005. In this frame, the present study was conducted in order to systematically examine research papers on critical thinking skills in terms of several variables published between the years 2005 and 2014 in national journals which are indexed by SSCI and the ULAKBIM social sciences database. In this context, a total of 93 articles from 29 different journals were analyzed using the NVivo 10, SPSS 18, and Microsoft Excel programs and performing content analysis which is widely used in qualitative studies. According to the findings, a large number of the studies were from 2011 and 2013, and they were carried out by female researchers on prospective teachers using quantitative methods and descriptive research design; they used scales as data collection tools. However, it was found that only one study was made at the primary school level and there have not been any researches performed in kindergartens, English or Math classes, or for improving a model.

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