The effect of different teaching styles on critical thinking and achievement goals of prospective teachers

Abstract

Learning environment enriched with diverse teaching styles can be effective in fostering critical thinking (CT) and achievement goals (AG) for preparing prospective teachers to cope with challenges of twenty-first century. To examine the effect of diverse teaching styles on prospective teachers’ CT and AG; guided discovery, convergent discovery and divergent production styles (Mosston & Ashworth, 2002) were used in teaching of badminton during fourteen weeks. Voluntary participants were forty prospective classroom teachers (treatment group n=20; comparison group n=20) from a Teacher Education Program at a public university in central Turkey. California Critical Thinking Skills Test-Form 2000 (CCTST), The California Critical Thinking Disposition Inventory (CCTDI) and Trichotomous Achievement Goal Scale (TAGS) were administered as pre-post test. The results showed that diverse teaching styles had positive effect on CT skills, CT dispositions, AG of performance approach and performance avoidance, but negative effect on mastery AG of prospective teachers