The Effect of Critical Thinking on Metacognitive Knowledge and Epistemological Beliefs of High School Students

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of teaching critical thinking on meta-cognitive awareness and epistemological beliefs of high school students. Methodology: The present study was a semi-experimental study with pre-test, post-test and follows up with control group. The statistical population of this study was all second grade high school students in Zahedan. The sample consisted of 30 subjects who were selected by randomized cluster sampling and were randomly assigned to either experimental (15 subjects) or control (15 People). The data collection tool was a meta-cognitive awareness questionnaire by Schraw and Dennison (1994) and epistemological questionnaire (EQ) (Schumer, 1990, 1993). At first, subjects of both groups were pre-test and then the experimental group received 12 critical thinking training sessions. While the control group did not receive any intervention. For analyzing the data, covariance analysis was used by SPSS software. Findings: The results showed that there is a significant difference between the mean scores of meta-cognitive awareness and epistemological beliefs in the experimental and control groups in the post-test (P <0.01). The effect of teaching critical thinking on metacognitive awareness and epistemological beliefs of students in the follow up phase has continued. Conclusion: teaching critical thinking was effective on metacognitive awareness and epistemological beliefs of students. Teaching students to improve the effective use of abilities improve their performance and provide them with reasonable decision making and thinking.