Critical Thinking Attitude and Some Other Variables in Predicting Students’ Democratic Attitudes

Abstract

This research was conducted to determine the effects of the attitudes towards critical thinking, gender, socioeconomic factors (education level of parents, income level, place of residence) as well as academic success, reading and television viewing habits in predicting the democratic attitudes of the fourth grade students. The research was carried out with the participation of 1066 students studying in the 4th grades of primary schools in the central districts of Diyarbakır in the 2017-2018 academic year. The study is descriptive and has a relational screening model. The "Democratic Attitude Scale" (DAS) developed by Erbil and Kocabaş (2017) was employed to determine the students' democratic attitudes and the "Critical Thinking Attitude Scale" (CTAS) developed by Akar-Vural (2005) was used to measure their critical thinking attitudes. A Personal Information Form was used to get information about the students. As a result of the research, democratic attitudes of the students were found "very good" and their attitudes towards critical thinking were "good". According to the results of the regression analysis, it was determined that all the independent variables of the study predicted the students' democratic attitudes at the level of 17%. It was found that critical thinking attitude scores (2.7%), socioeconomic factors (6.5%), and academic success, television viewing and reading habits (7.5%) significantly predicted the students' democratic attitudes. Considering the regression coefficients, it was seen that gender, maternal education level and reading habits did not contribute significantly to predicting democratic attitudes.