The Impact of the Content Approach of Teaching Philosophy for Children on Metacognitive beliefs and Critical Thinking of elementary school students

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of the P4C content approach on the meta-cognitive beliefs and critical thinking of students and experimental method with pre-test, post-test design. The statistical population consisted of all sixth grade elementary school students in Torbat-e Heidariye city who studied in the academic year of 2016-2017, of whom through cluster sampling and after screening, 50 students   randomly divided into two experimental and control groups. Measurement tools included the Children's meta-cognition questionnaire (MCQ_C) (Bekaw et al., 2009, Modified by Qaderi et al., 2012) and the Sasu critical thinking Scale (2013). At first, both groups were tested. Then, for the experimental group, 10 sessions of 1 hour content approach of P4C was provided, and the control group did not receive any special training during this period. At the end, again from both groups received a post-test, Data were analyzed by SPSS software using multivariate covariance test and variance analysis, and the results showed that using content approach of P4C  with 95% probability with metacognitive and critical thinking  of students has a significant relationship, So that the average scores of meta cognitive beliefs in the experimental group after the practice of teaching philosophy have been significantly decreased, so average scores of critical thinking increased, if there is no significant change in the control group. Finally, the research hypothesis that the content approach of P4C has a significant effect on the meta-cognitive and critical thinking of male students in the sixth grade of elementary school students has been confirmed.