Editing educational strategies to develop critical thinking in the junior high school curriculum

Critical thinking is recognized as one of the best skills that students need to live outside of school. The purpose of this study is to develop educational strategies for the development of critical thinking in the curriculum of the first secondary school in Kermanshah.

The method of this study was exploratory in two phases: qualitative and quantitative. In the qualitative stage of the research, data collection method was used. In the quantitative stage, a questionnaire containing 80 questions was designed based on the findings of the qualitative stage. The statistical population in the qualitative part includes 12 experts and specialists in curriculum planning of Kermanshah University (government, free, cultural) who were selected by purposive sampling method and in the quantitative part was the statistical population of teachers in Kermanshah in the first year of high school Using available sampling method, 320 people were selected as the sample size. The study tool was a semi-structured interview technique in the qualitative part and a researcher-made questionnaire in the quantitative part. The face and content validity of this tool was confirmed by 4 relevant experts. The reliability of the tool was calculated by a pre-test on a sample of 30 people to be 0.93. The data analysis method in the qualitative part was content analysis and in the quantitative part were descriptive and inferential statistics and confirmatory factor analysis using SPSS 18 and LISREL software.

In the qualitative section of 14 codes, 3 criteria were identified. In the quantitative part, the calculated CMIN / DF value was 2.143. Also, the RMSEA value was 0.026. Indicators (GFI), (AGFI), (CFI), (NNFI), (TLI), (IFI) and (RFI) are also higher than 0.90 in the present model. The data of this study have a good fit with the factor structure of this scale.

Therefore, developing critical thinking skills is one of the main and ultimate goals of the educational system and is not possible except through the strategy and strategic plan of curricula in critical thinking. The most important effective strategies for developing critical thinking skills include; Questions and answers were participatory methods, teaching how to think and reason, storytelling, role-playing and metacognitive strategies.