The Contribution Of Motivational Beliefs And Scientific Process Skills On Middle School Students' Critical Thinking

Author(s):

Derya Yahsi(presenting / submitting)Nurcan Kahraman(presenting)

Conference:

ECER 2013

Network:

01. Continuing Professional Development: Learning for Individuals, Leaders, and Organisations

Format:

Paper

Session Information

01 SES 06 A, Impact of Professional Learning

Paper Session

Time:

2013-09-11

15:30-17:00

Room:

B-202

Chair:

Heinz Guenter Holtappels

Contribution

Critical thinking is one of the important characteristic that sees as center of the higher education (Kuhn, 1999). Critical thinking is an essential process not only for learning but also for cognitive development Epstein (1999). Ennis (1962) define critical thinking as a logical and product-oriented operation and idea of statements. According to Akar (2007) critical thinking requires thinking deeply, being active, conscious, having purpose, interrogating, judging, thinking what to believe or not believe and what to do and considering all these during decision process. According to Chaffee (1988) critical thinking is our real, aimed and totally organized efforts by observing our other peoples thoughts carefully in order to understand our world and to reveal and improve our understandings. Critical thinking skills refer to some abilities such as analyzing, synthesizing and evaluating information and tendency of applying them (Halpern, 2001).

Method

Participants One hundred and eight 7th grade middle school students attending public elementary schools participated in the study. There were 52 girls and 54 boys in the sample. Instruments Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire (MSLQ) It is a self-reported questionnaire developed by Pintrich, Garcia, and McKeachie (1991). Students rate themselves on a seven point Likert scale from “not at all true of me” to very true of me” concerning different aspects of their learning and motivational strategies. The MSLQ translated and adopted in to Turkish by SUNGUR (2004). In this study, the MSLQ was used to assess students’ motivational beliefs, like self efficacy and task value and their critical thinking. The reliability coefficients were .85 for task value, .93 for self efficacy and .82 for the critical thinking. The Science Process Skills Test The Science Process Skills is developed by Okey, Wise and Burns (1982) and translated and adapted into Turkish by Geban, Aşkar, and Özkan (1992). The test consists of 36 multiple-choice questions. The reliability coefficient of the test was 0.85.

Expected Outcomes

Results Descriptive results The descriptive results were used to investigate the general profile of 7th grade students in terms of motivational beliefs, scientific process skills and critical thinking. Table I also presents means, Standard deviations, and minimum and maximum values of the variables. Inferential results Results showed that the linear combination of task value, self efficacy and scientific process skills significantly accounted for 50 % of variance in critical thinking (R= .71, F= 33.07, p< .05). This findings implied that students who believe that s/he can handle the science tasks, who finds science activities useful, interesting or enjoyable and who have high science process skills like observation, questioning, identifying and stating hypotheses, designing investigations demonstrate higher levels of critical thinking in science. Actually, these findings were expected and parellel with other results. Also previous studies show positive relation between motivational beliefs (e.g.Garcia, & Pintrich, 1992), scientific process skills (e.g.Vitti & Torres, 2006) and critical thinking.

References

Akar, Ü. (2007). Öğretmen adaylarının bilimsel süreç becerileri ve eleştirel düşünme beceri düzeyleri arasındaki ilişki. Sosyal Bilimler Enstitüsü, Afyon Kocatepe Üniversitesi. Aktamış, H. (2009). İlköğretim düzeyinde bilimsel süreç becerilerini kazandırma yöntemlerinin örneklerle incelenmesi. İlköğretmen Eğitimci Dergisi, 30, 52-56. Chaffee, J. (1988). Thinking critically. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. Eccles, J.& Wigfield, A. (2002). Motivational beliefs, values and goals. Annual Review of Psychology, 53 , 109–132. Epstein, R. L. (1999). Critical thinking, Belmont: Wadsworth Publishing Company. Ennis, R. H. (1962). A concept of critical thinking. Harvard Educational Review, 32, 81–111. Garcia, T., & Pintrich, P.R. (1992). Critical thinking and its relationship to motivation, learning strategies, and classroom experience. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Psychological Association, Washington, DC, August. Geban, Ö, Aşkar, P., & Özkan, İ. (1992). Effects of computer simulated experiments and problem solving approaches on students learning outcomes at the high school level. Journal of Educational Research, 86(1), 5-10. Halpern, D. F. (2001). Assessing the effectiveness of critical thinking instruction. The Journal of General Education, 50(4), 270–286. Kanfer, R. & Ackerman, P.L. (1989). Motivation and cognitive abilities: An integrative/aptitude-treatment interaction approach to skill acquisition. Journal of Applied Psychology, 74, 657-690. Kuhn, D. (1999). A developmental model of critical thinking. Educational Researcher, 28, 16–25. Okey, J.R.,Wise, K.C., & Bums, J.C.(1982). Integrated Process Skill Test2.(Available From Dr. Lames R. Okey, Department of Science Education, University of Georgia, Athens, GA 30362). Phan, H., P. (2009) Relations between goals, self‐efficacy, critical thinking and deep processing strategies: a path analysis, Educational Psychology: An International Journal of Experimental Educational Psychology, 29(7), 777-799. Pekmez, E. Ş. (2000). Procedural understanding: teachers’ perceptions of conceptual basis of practical work. Unpublished PhD dissertation,University of Durham, UK. Pintrich, P.R. & De Groot E. (1990). Motivational and self-regulated learning components of classroom academic performance. Journal of Educational

Author Information

Derya Yahsi (presenting / submitting)

ORTA DOGU TEKNIK UNIVERSITESI

SCIENCE EDUCATION

ANKARA

Nurcan Kahraman (presenting)

Çanakkale 18 Mart Üniversitesi,Turkey

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