Abstract
In educational psychology, individual differences have always received remarkable attention, with attention increasing in mental aspects such as thinking styles in recent years and with implications for teaching and learning. The aim of the present study is to investigate the possible connection between thinking styles and academic and social integration. It is well-known that psychological constructs like thinking styles play a role in certain behaviors or preferences and studying them can shed light on the educational process. The present study was conducted with 79 pre-service EFL teachers, all of whom are 4th grade learners. One reason for having 4th grade learners is that they have well-established ideas and attitudes towards academic and social integration. In order to collect data, two questionnaires were used. The first one is the Thinking Styles Inventory (TSI), developed by Sternberg and Wagner (1991). It is a comprehensive tool containing 104 items. There are 13 subscales, with 8 items each. The second tool is the Academic and Social Integration Scale, developed by Pascarella & Terenzini (1980). It contains 5 sub-dimensions, peer-group interaction, interactions with faculty, faculty concern for student development & teaching, academic & intellectual development, and institutional and goal commitments. The findings of the study indicate that the most common thinking styles are oligarchic, executive, and liberal thinking style while the least common thinking styles are conservative and hierarchical thinking style and it was the liberal thinking styles that mostly correlated with academic and social integration.
Highlights
As one of the critical components of individual differences in psychology, thinking styles have received considerable attention in educational studies in recent years
The aim of the present study was to examine the potential connection between thinking styles and academic and social integration
As it has already been perceived, such concepts as thinking styles exercise a prescriptive function in specific behaviors or tendencies within the scope of educational psychology and for this reason; it is considerably valuable to study them in order to elucidate the educational process
Summary
As one of the critical components of individual differences in psychology, thinking styles have received considerable attention in educational studies in recent years. It was the American psychologist Robert Sternberg, who put forward the idea of thinking styles in 1988, the theory becoming known as “mental self-government”, where he suggested that one could control or manage his or her daily activities in many different ways, referred to as “thinking styles”. The Integration of international students—a UK perspective report, issued in 2014 by the British Council, suggested that ASI is crucial for academic success but SDU International Journal of Educational Studies, 8(1), 2021, Page 19-35
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