A Study on the Relationship of Thinking Styles of Students and Their Critical Thinking Skills

Abstract

This study was done to investigate the relationship between thinking styles and critical thinking skills among university students. Participants in this study were 207 students who were selected via multi-stage cluster sampling. Sternberg and wagners’ thinking styles inventory (1992) was used for assessing students’ thinking styles and their critical thinking skills were assessed by California critical thinking skills’ Test B form (Facione & Facione, 1992, 1998). The results indicated that there was a significance relationship between thinking styles and critical thinking skills and the level of significance was 0.95. That means students’ thinking styles have the ability to predict their critical thinking skills. There was also a positive and meaningful correlation between executive thinking style and the total scores of critical thinking skills. However, there were no a significance relationship between Executive thinking style with evaluation and analysis components of criticalthinking skills. The correlations between judicial thinking style and all aspects of critical thinking were significant. The results also showed that there ware meaningful correlations between legislative thinking style with the total scores of critical thinking skills. However, there was no a significance relationship between legislative thinking style and evaluation component of critical thinking skills.