Designing a Critical Thinking Pattern Based on Vigotsky's Constructionist Theory and its Impact on Students' Critical Thinking

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to identify the components of critical thinking education model based on the Vygotsky’s constructivist theory and to study the effectiveness of the model on the critical thinking of the fifth grade elementary students. The method of this study wascombined studies (qualitative and quantitative). The statistical population in the qualitative section included all relevant articles indexed in databases of science direct, PubMed, cinahl, and Scopus. From this population, 34 articles were selected using purposeful sampling and for validate the pattern were selected 32 relevant experts by purposeful snowball sampling. The statistical population of quantitative part consisted all 5th grade elementary school students in the academic year of 2017-2018 in Tehran. From this population, 66 people were selected using a cluster sampling method and randomly assigned two experimental and control groups. Data collection tools included researcher-made questionnaire and the Watson-Glaser critical thinking appraisal (1998). To analyze the qualitative section data was used content analysis, for patternvalidation using the confirmatory factor analysis and effectiveness section was performed using covariance analysis. The findings showed that the critical thinking model were classified according to Vygotsky’s theory in three classes: teacher role, learner's role and the role of knowledge. The results showed that fitting the critical thinking model was optimal according to experts and critical thinking pattern led to a significant difference between groups in critical thinking by 53%. According to the results, applying Critical Thinking Model based on Vygotsky's theory is effective on critical thinking of students.

Keywords

• critical thinking pattern
• constructionist theory
• vygotsky