Document Type : Research Paper
Authors
1 Assistant Professor at the Department of Psychology, Islamic Azad University-Malayer Branch; email: ganji@iau-malayer.ac.ir
2 . Assistant Professor at the Department of Psychology, Bu-Ali Sina University
3 MA in Educational Psychology, Islamic Azad University-Hamedan Branch
Abstract
The aim of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of teaching questioning skills to teachers on critical thinking of male high school students. The design of the research was quasi-experimental, involving pretest-posttest and control group. The population consisted of all male high school students and teachers of Malayer, out of which 219 2nd and 3rd year students of humanities and electronics were randomly selected and analyzed in two groups (113 in control group and 106 in experimental group) and 8 classes. The experimental group consisting of 4 teachers (philosophy, logic, religious studies, and applied electronics) attended the questioning skills course, while the control group did not take part in the course. Form B of the California Critical Thinking Skills Test (Facione and Facione, 1997) was used for data collection. The collected data were analyzed using analysis of covariance and t tests. The findings and pretest scores showed that the students of both groups were equal with regards to age, course averages, IQ, critical thinking ability, and its subscales. The analysis of covariance showed that teaching questioning skills to the teachers increased the students’ critical thinking ability by 12%. Moreover, the five subscales of critical thinking ability increased as the following: analysis 9%, evaluation 12%, inference 4%, deductive reasoning 6%, and inductive reasoning 5%. The differences between the mean scores of critical thinking skills and its five subscales among students of humanities and electronics were not significant.
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