Iranian and Turkish EFL instructors’ Critical Openness, Reflective Skepticism, Innovative Thinking and Accountability: A comparative study

Abstract

The increasing interest in Turkish educational programs has led to the increasing interest in educational migration among the younger Iranian generations. Instructors, as the executive part of educational programs, can also play a key role in satisfying students’ expectations and educational goals. The aim of this study was to identify and compare the Critical Openness (CO), Reflective Skepticism (RS), innovative thinking (IT), external accountability (EA), and internal accountability (IA) for the Iranian and Turkish English as Foreign Language (EFL) instructors through an online survey with Critical Thinking Theory and the 21st century skill consideration lens. To this end, a convenient sample of Iranian (N = 286) and Turkish (N = 281) EFL instructors were invited to take part in the online survey voluntarily. The scales consisted of the Likert scales of Rosenblatt (2017) [1], Semerci (2007) [2], and Sosu (2013) [3], because the conceptual frameworks were also taken from these studies. In the analysis stage, MANOVA was conducted to compare the results of the online survey between Iranian and Turkish EFL instructors in terms of their level of CO, RS, IT, EA, and IA. The analysis of the collected data uncovered that Turkish EFL instructors got higher scores in CO, RS, EA, and IA than Iranian EFL instructors while Iranian EFL instructors received higher scores in the employment of IT. The implications of the results would suggest collaborations between educational policymakers and teacher training course designers.

Keywords

• Critical thinking
• Reflective thinking
• Accountability
• Innovative thinking
• MANOVA
• Cross cultural study