Investigation of Prospective Mathematics Teachers' Critical Thinking Dispositions

This paper investigated the impact of a technology-enhanced instructional model developed to foster student's critical reasoning abilities on candidate mathematics teachers' critical thinking dispositions. To facilitate technology-supported instruction in transformation geometry and to enhance the critical thinking skills of pre-service teachers, lesson plans were developed in alignment with the content-based teaching approach, which is recognized as an effective method for promoting critical thinking. These lesson plans were subsequently implemented over the course of 14 instructional hours. The objectıves of the lesson plans were formed by the objectıves of transformatıonal geometry of secondary school mathematıcs course. The applıcatıons ın the teachıng of these objectıves were desıgned to develop the crıtıcal thınkıng skılls ıdentıfıed by facı̇one (1990).The study was conducted during the fall term of the 2019-2020 academic year, with 56 candidate teachers in the fourth grade at a state university in the Marmara Region in Turkey. The research used the Critical Thinking Disposition (CTD) scale as a data collection tool. The researchers implemented the CTD scale on candidate teachers as a pre- and post-test. Then, the researchers evaluated the results using the t-test for dependent samples and assessed the different aspects of the CTD (higher cognition, flexibility, systematicity, perseverance and patience, open-mindedness) framework. As a result of the research, according to the data of the CTD scale, implemented as a pre- and post-test on the candidate teachers, the pre-test critical reasoning abilities and sub-dimension mean points of the candidate teachers increased after the designed instructional model applications. Considering evaluations of these score increases statistically, there was a 0.05 significance level. The instructional model applications contributed to candidate teachers' critical thinking dispositions and sub-dimensions.