Summary


THE EFFECT OF PERCEIVED PARENT ATTITUDES ON CRITICAL THINKING TENDENCIES ON PRIMARY SCHOOL 4TH GRADES

The purpose of this research is to determine the effect of perceived parental attitudes on students' critical thinking dispositions in primary school 4th graders. This research was conducted with the relational screening model. The participant group of this research is 178 4th grade students studying in Kayseri in the 2020-2021 academic year. "Parental Attitude Assessment Scale" and "Critical Thinking Tendency Scale" were used as data collection tools in the research. The arithmetic means, frequencies, and standard deviations of the obtained data were calculated and Mann-Whitney U test and correlation analysis were used for comparisons. As a result of these analyzes, it was determined that students who perceive their parents' attitudes as democratic have a significantly higher tendency to think critically than students who perceive them as authoritarian. This situation shows that perceived parental attitudes have a significant effect on the critical thinking dispositions of primary school fourth grade students. On the other hand, it has been observed that a significant part of the effect of these parental attitudes on children's critical thinking tendency is composed of perceived father attitudes. Particularly, children who grew up in family environments where both parents are democratic have the highest tendency to think critically. These results reveal that children should be brought up in family environments where both parents exhibit democratic attitudes and behaviors from an early age in order for the critical thinking tendency to be formed and developed. In addition, the limited number of studies in the literature (due to the fact that parental attitudes are generally considered together) on the effects of only mothers or fathers on their children's critical thinking tendencies causes this effect to not be fully understood. In this study, it was also revealed that fathers play an important role in the development of their children's critical thinking tendencies

Keywords

Attitude, critical thinking tendency, perceived parental attitude

References