THE EFFECT OF THE SUBJECT BASED CRITICAL THINKING APPLIED THROUGH 10TH GRADE PHYSICS COURSE ON THE ATTITUDE OF CRITICAL THINKING AND PHYSICS ACHIEVEMENT

In this study, it is investigated that whether there is a significant change in the critical thinking attitudes and academic achievement of students between the experimental group and the control group. For experimental group the subject-based critical thinking strategy is applied and for the control group current teaching strategies are applied. Pretest-posttest design with control group is chosen for the study. The study is based on "Electrical and Magnetism" subjects in the physics course and it lasted for 6 weeks. The study group consisted of a total of 66 students from the 10th grade of a high school located in the central Adana province in the academic year 2014-2015. "Critical Thinking Attitude Scale" developed by ？zel？i (2012) and "Readiness Success Test" developed by ？z？if？i (2012) were applied and also semi-structured interview form was used in the research. In the analysis of the quantitative data, descriptive values and ANCOVA were applied and in the analysis of qualitative data content analysis was used. As a result of the study, the students in the experimental group had a significant increase in critical thinking attitude scores and the critical thinking attitude scores were highly correlated with the physical achievement scores. Also, it is concluded that students have different thoughts about what critical thinking is