Critical Thinking Standards Scale for the Teacher Candidates: Study of Validity and Reliability

Abstract

Critical thinking skill allows individuals efficiently to get benefit of all aspects of life. Although the construct is of important, the research regarding critical thinking is very limited in national literature. Because the culture-affected skills needs to be measured with national scales, small numbers of national scale cause problems in research. In the current study, 6-factor critical thinking standards scale was aimed to develop for teacher candidates. 586 undergraduate students participated in the present study from Çukurova University Faculty of Education. After the exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis performed, 42- item scale was obtained with three factors. The internal consistency coefficient of factor was found as .89, .78 and .63; and as .75 for the general scale. Finally, as a result of exploratory factor analysis, factors of the scale have been found to explain approximately 36% of the variance.