Investigation of Hypothetico-Creative Reasoning Skills of Teacher Trainees in Terms of Their Thinking Styles

Abstract

Thinking styles more boradly intellectual styles refers to people's partly fixed, relatively stable and innate preferences about information processing and handling with the tasks that they may confront (Zhang & Sternberg, 2005). Sternberg's (1988) introduced of the theory of mental self-government, where intellectual style specifies 13 thinking styles that fall along five dimensions of mental self-government: (a) functions, (b) forms, (c) levels, (d) scopes, and (e) leanings of government as applied to individuals (Zhang, Sternberg, Rayner, 2002: 14). Hypothetico-Creative reasoning model developed by Duran (2014) can be defined skills including logical and creative thinking skills in 12 dimensions. This study, is a descriptive study based on, relational screening model among the screening models. The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between learning styles proposed by Sternberg (1988) and hypothetico-creative reasoning skills proposed by Duran (2014) in the context of the characteristics of left an right brains or thinking modes emphasized by Zhang (2002). The population consists of all the second grade students (N=383) in those departments in the education period 2015-2016 in English Teaching Department, Preschool Education Department, Department of Elementary Education, The Department of Computer Education and Instruction, The Department of Psychological Counseling And Guidance. It was found thatstudents are more prone to use their right brains, that is lateralization of hepispheric specialization is thought to be in right side. Hence students perceive themselves to use Type I thinking, holistic mode of thinking styles indicating that they use right brain hence perceive themselves to be more holistic, creative and experiantial learners.