A Study of the Impacts of Teaching

The purpose of this research was to study the effects of teaching philosophy on the questioning skills and critical thinking of female grade five primary school students of district two in Qazwin. The research instrument was a researcher-made questionnaire, and the research design was quasi-experimental, which was carried out following Lipman’s method. In order to achieve the purpose of the study, philosophy was taught to the participants of the study for 16 sessions in order to improve their questioning skills. The sample consisted of 50 students chosen from among the population of female grade five primary school students in Qazwin following the purposive method. Later they were divided into two experimental and control groups each consisting of 25 students. In order to stimulate the students’ sense of curiosity and questioning attitude, which is necessary for teaching philosophy to children and conducting philosophical discussions, the researchers used some of the philosophical stories of Kam, Fisher, Lisa, and Layla and some of Mulla Nasr al-Din’s moral stories. In order to analyze the data for the confirmation or rejection of the first research hypothesis a t-test for dependent groups was run. Similarly, an independent t-test was run to test the second research hypothesis. After rejecting the null hypotheses formulated in relation to the two analyses, the findings confirmed the first hypothesis at α = 0.01 and the second hypothesis at α = 0.05. In other words, the statistical analysis of the data indicated that there was a significant statistical difference between the pretest and posttest scores of the questioning skills of the students who participated in the philosophy course. Moreover, there was a statistically significant difference between the posttest scores of the control and experimental groups. Thus it was concluded that the teaching of philosophy improves the students’ questioning skills and critical thinking. Key Terms ,