The Effect of Blended Learning on Critical Thinking Components of Primary School Students

In modern education and training, thinking has a special place and critical thinking as a level of thinking can be taught and nurtured. One of the results of developing critical thinking is thoughtful curiosity, objectivity, breadth of thought (open-mindedness), flexibility, reasonable skepticism, wise honesty, methodicality, persistence, and perseverance when trying to resolve disputes and being determined. In today's era, the necessity of dealing with critical thinking in education has been emphasized to respond to the rapid changes in the environment. Therefore, this research aims to examine the role of blended education in the critical thinking of sixth-grade girl students.

The research method used in this research is the control group method with pre-test - post-test, which is part of the semi-experimental methods. The statistical population is all 300 female students of the 6th grade of an elementary school in district 15 of Tehran, 32 of whom were selected using available and targeted sampling; 16 people were randomly selected as the control group and 16 people as the experimental group. The research design is a pre-test and post-test design with a control group. The first observation was by performing a pre-test and the second was by performing a post-test. It should be mentioned that the experimental group received a total of 5 hours of blended training for 6 sessions (50 minutes each session). Furthermore, it can be mentioned that the research collection tool is Ritex's (2003) critical thinking questionnaire, whose validity has been approved by expert professors and its reliability has been reported by Cronbach's alpha coefficient of 0.80.

The findings showed that the average scores of critical thinking group membership of students in the experimental group and the control group have a statistically significant difference (P<0.01). In other words, the students who were in the experimental group under blended training had an increase in the amount of critical thinking compared to the control group who were not under training.

The present study showed that blended learning plays an effective role in strengthening students' critical thinking.