Impacts of the Program of Teaching Philosophy for Children on the Skills of Meaningfulness, Tolerance of Ambiguity, Harmony, and Drawing Conclusions in the Development of Student's Critical Thinking

This study aimed to explore the impacts of the program of teaching philosophy to children on the skills of meaningfulness, tolerance of ambiguity, harmony, and drawing conclusions on the development of students’ critical thinking. The research sample consisted of 42 female fifth graders studying at a primary school in Ilam in 2013-2014 chosen based on the convenient method of sampling. The program of teaching philosophy was implemented in the experimental class but not in the control class. The required data was collected by means of the Measurement of Critical Thinking Questionnaire developed by Robert H. Ennis. The statistical Package for Social Sciences, version 20 (SPSS 20) was used to compute the required descriptive statistics. The Multivariate Analysis of Variance was also run in order to compare the performances of the two groups at the end of the experiment. The results indicated that there was a meaningful difference between the two groups in terms of the main variables of the study (critical thinking skills). In other words, the teaching of philosophy increased the students’ critical thinking ability and its related skills.