Many psychologist and educators have attributed students’ successes and failure in academic achievement mainly to individual differences in cognitive abilities. In the past few decades, scholars have been examining other factors that affect students’ learning outcomes. One of the major interesting factors investigated is the “style” construct. There have been three different approaches in conceptualization of the styles. These are cognition, personality and activity-centered (Grigorenko & Sternberg, 1995). Sternberg (1988) developed a different theory of styles: theory of mental self-government. According to this theory the thinking styles are observed into 13 thinking styles that fall along five dimensions of mental self-government: (a) functions: legislative, executive, judicial, (b) forms: monarchic, hiyerarchic, oligarchic, anarchic), (c) levels: global, local, (d) scope: internal, external; (e) leanings: liberal, conservative. It was indicated that thinking styles, defined in the theory of mental self-government, are the significant reasonable predictors of academic achievement over and above self-rated abilities (Zhang & Sternberg, 1998). Students’ thinking styles contribute more to their academic achievement than their abilities assessed by performance tests (Grigorenko & Sternberg, 1997; Garcia & Hughes, 2000; Bernardo, Zhang & Callueng, 2002; Zhang, 2002, 2004). The other factor that affects students’ learning outcomes is the level of social skills of the students. Social skills are described as the interaction between the person and the environment and the tools used to initiate and maintain vital interpersonal relations (Phillips, 1978). In formal education periods schools should include intra and interpersonal skills. Individuals with well developed intrapersonal skills are able to have self-regulation and self-management skills (Gardner, 1993). The inter-personal skills involve abilities to read and aware of distinction in moods, temperaments, motivation, intentions and feeling of others (Armstrong, 1994). In addition, educational practices for the development social and emotional skills of the students enable growth in their cognitive skills and behavior development. Both thinking styles and social skills affect the way we perceive the world, the way we get the information, the way we implement and how we relate to others. Thinking styles and social skills shape our experiences of the world and teach us how to comprehend the world around us. In this study it was aimed to investigate the relationship and connections between thinking styles based on the theory of self-mental government theory and the social skills such as empathy, intra and interpersonal skills, and to question the roles of these constructs in academic achievement.

A hundred-thirty seven student teachers from Marmara University responded to the “Thinking Styles Inventory” (TSI; Sternberg & Wagner, 1992) and ‘Social Skills Scale’ (SSC) developed by Palut, Aydın and Derelioğlu (2000). The TSI is a self-report inventory consisting of 65 items. The SSC is also a self-report inventory consisting of 46 items. The academic achievement of the student teachers was determined by considering their scores in university entrance exam and their grade point averages when they finished the high school. In the analyses, the correlation analyses between the thinking styles scores, university entrance exam and grade point average scores were conducted. Second, the same analyses were conducted between university entrance exam scores, grade point average and social skills scores of the student teachers. Finally, in order to determine whether the thinking styles and the social skills of the students are successful to predict the academic achievement, the regression analyses was conducted.

Based on the characteristics of the thinking styles and social skills, it is predicted that social skills are positively correlated with the use of legislative, judicial, hierarchic, local, external and liberal thinking styles, and both the thinking styles and social skills are successful in predicting academic achievement.