Effect of conversational teaching on philosophical rings on elementary students' reflective thinking

The program of teaching philosophical thinking to children is a program for improving childrenchr('39')s thinking. In this way, the learner, will discover the concepts, principles, rules and thus acquire the necessary knowledge without the help of the teacher. The present study aimed to investigate the effect of the teaching method of dialogue in philosophical study circles on the growth of thinking in sixth-grade boys in the Sangar district of Rasht city in Iran.

This experimental study was a pretest-posttest with control group. The statistical population consisted of all sixth-grade students in Sangar city. Sixty of them were selected by two-stage cluster sampling and replaced by two groups of 30 experimental and control groups. For collecting data, the Questionnaire for Reflective Thinking (Kember, 2000) was used. Eight stories from Persian, religious, and international texts were selected for the experimental group to run an independent variable, which had a storyline in eight sessions and each session. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics and ANCOVA covariance analysis.

The results showed that teaching philosophical thinking positively and significantly affects children’s reflective thinking. The impact effect of training was 37 percent.

Therefore, using the philosophy of teaching method, children are trained to develop their thinking and reasoning skills in dialogue and to develop analytical thinking skills.