The changes in social, cultural, and economic structures of contemporary societies have urged for a new education perspective that addresses key competences determined by the European Commission such as literacy, civic, and digital competence. These competences not only ensure personal fulfillment and active citizenship but also ensure that everyone has access to quality and inclusive education (Council Recommendation on Key Competences for Lifelong Learning, 2018). Skills such as critical thinking, creativity, and collaboration are emphasized for the attainment of the key competences.

Among those skills, Critical thinking (CT) is “purposeful, reasoned, and goal-directed. It is the kind of thinking involved in solving problems, formulating inferences, calculating likelihoods, and making decisions.” and includes reflecting on the thinking process (Halpern, 1998, p. 70). It further refers to reasonable and reflective thinking (Ennis, 2011); analysis of arguments (Ennis, 1985), reasoning and evaluating (Facione, 1990), and making reasonable decisions (Halpern, 1998).

            In the field of education, CT is rooted in the works of John Dewey (Ennis, 1991). Built on his work, CT has become a scholarly matter in the field of education (e.g. Ennis, 2013; Penkauskiene et al., 2019). Some of this genre of literature reports findings on educational interventions to improve CTS and CTD of students and teachers. Most recently, a framework was developed to teach CT (Heard et al., 2020). Similarly, within the scope of Critical Thinking Across the European Higher Education Curricula – CRITHINKEDU project, based on perceptions of 189 participants across nine European countries and from four different professional fields, researchers propose new learning outcomes to be integrated into the existing European university curricula (Dumitr et al., 2018). As our knowledge is extended, CT has been listed among the 21^st-century skills. Accordingly, countries, including Turkey, have integrated CT into their curricula while attributing a critical role to teachers in the development of CTS and CTD as teachers are the key actors of curriculum implementation.

In this regard, the literature reveals that when guided by teachers who had training to teach CT, educational interventions that aim to facilitate students’ CTS are more effective (Abrami et al., 2008). Nevertheless, there are problems derived from the teachers’ approach to teaching CT (Stenberg, 1987). This shifts our attention to teacher education through asking whether we can train our future teachers as capable of teaching CT because as Paul et al. (1997) contend, teacher education plays an important role in equipping teacher candidates with skills and knowledge to teach CT. However, including CT in teacher education programs is not sufficient. Beyond positivist perspectives that downgrade CT into a set of skills to improve thinking, problem-solving without asking questions about the problem itself (etc. Whose problem is this?), a process that should be exercised only by the student, and an abstract mode of thinking independent of lives of students and teachers, CT requires informed and committed action (Fernandez-Balboa, 1993). This can only be achieved by critical educators who are aware of the power of education as a transformative means (Giroux, 1988).

Built on the aforementioned literature, along with Yıldırım’s (2013) call for review papers that evaluate teacher education research conducted in Turkey and relate it to the international literature, this study aims to synthesize the research on CTS and CTD of pre-service teachers in Turkey. The following research questions guided our study:

1. What critical thinking areas do the studies in teacher education focus?

2. What methodological traditions do the studies on critical thinking represent?

3. What are the knowledge claims studies on critical thinking offer for practice and further research?

Synthesis studies are of primary importance as they bring the knowledge together generated from individual studies together (Glaser & Strauss, 1971). Grounded on this notion, this study is designed as a meta synthesis study which “brings individual qualitative studies together with one another at a more abstract level through a process of translation and synthesis” (Zimmer, 2006, p. 312). The aim is to determine common and contradictory patterns across studies through interpreting existing knowledge to generate new knowledge (Aspfors, & Franson, 2015). The educational research regarding Turkish pre-service teachers CTS and CTD was investigated in electronic national and international databases via EBSCOHOST service Academic Search Complete, Education Source, ERIC, Humanities International Complete, MasterFILE Complete, Social Sciences Index Retrospective, Teacher Reference Center, and TR Dizin. The search was limited to the accessible full-text empirical articles that were published in academic journals. Theses, dissertations, and conference papers, as well as scale development and program development/evaluation studies, were not included for the feasibility of the study. It was, moreover, restricted to the years from 2010 to 2020 to represent a recent portrayal of research conducted about teacher candidates’ CTS and CTD within the last decade’s educational context in Turkey. The descriptors we used for our search are namely: critical thinking and teacher candidate/pre-service teachers (460 studies including findings from other countries), critical thinking skills and teacher candidate/pre-service teachers (150 studies in Turkey), and critical thinking dispositions and teacher candidate/pre-service teachers (113 studies in Turkey). After excluding the studies that did not meet our criteria, we included 89 studies in this review. After determining the studies to be included in this synthesis, we first completed a descriptive analysis of the studies (e.g. research design, data collection instrument, majors of the participants, etc.). Then, we employed content analysis to determine the themes (Miles et al., 2018). through careful reading of each article and bringing the studies together under relevant themes considering the definitions/approaches/perspectives to define CT. Our analysis yielded eight main themes as CT as a higher-order thinking skill, CT as a self-controlled thinking process, CT as a developing skill, CT as a personal attribute, CT as a socially constructed skill, CT from a functionalist perspective, CT as part of democratic citizenship, CT as part of language skills.

Our preliminary analysis of the studies showed that almost half of the studies (n = 38) were designed as correlational research. The others were designed as survey research (n = 30), experimental research (n = 17), and qualitative research (n = 4). These studies mostly used the Turkish version of the California Critical Thinking Disposition Inventory (CCTDI) that was adapted by Kökdemir (2003) followed by the “Critical Thinking Scale” which was developed by Semerci (2000). The CT levels of pre-service teachers were low in general (n = 39), only 17 studies reported a high-level of CT of pre-service teachers. Our thematic analysis disclosed that CT was accepted as a developing process in the majority of the studies (n = 68). Half of the studies, besides, defined CT as a self-controlled thinking process (n = 44). Further, almost half of the studies (n = 40) approach CT from a functionalist perspective. Other themes emphasized CT as higher-order thinking skill (n = 39), personal attribute (n = 17), part of democratic citizenship (n = 13), socially-constructed skill (n = 7), and a component of language skills (n = 7). Our preliminary findings unveil that only a few studies underline the importance of CT as an asset of critical educators. This diverges teacher education programs from training teachers as intellectuals who actively take part in creating just societies. Our synthesis also warrants for intervention studies and use of family background variables in correlation studies. Besides, we advocate that teacher education programs should offer specific courses to help pre-service teachers to develop CTS. Lastly, we propose that future teachers should be provided with more practice courses in which they can engage in and reflect on real cases.

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