Effect of critical thinking based on Vygotsky's constructivism theory on the level of critical thinking among the students in the fifth grade elementary school.

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effect of critical thinking based on Vygotsky's constructivism theory on the level of critical thinking among the students in the fifth grade elementary school. The main hypothesis of this research was: teaching critical thinking based on Vygotsky's constructivism theory increases the critical thinking of the fifth grade elementary students. To examine this hypothesis, a semi-experimental method with pre-test and post-test design with control group was used. To investigate the effect of critical thinking training based on Vygotsky's constructivism theory on the critical thinking of these students Watson-Glaser critical thinking test in critical thinking was used. Statistical population of this study included all female Fifth grade students studying in elementary schools in Tehran during the academic year 2016-2017. In this research Shaheed Madani School in the 15th district of Tehran was selected by random cluster sampling. The sample size was 66 people (33 in the experimental group and 33 in the control group). In the present study, six specific training sessions were devoted to teaching the chosen science course in both the experimental and control groups. The results of this study showed that the experimental group obtained 23.7 points higher than the control group in the critical thinking test which is significant at 1% level. it can be said that the teaching of critical thinking based on Vygotsky's constructivism theory increases the critical thinking of students of the fifth grade elementary school which confirms the research hypothesis.