Students' Cognitive Awareness and Investigation of Critical Thinking Levels

Abstract

New concepts, new skills and new perspectives are emerging in the social sciences in the face of dazzling developments in science, health and technology sciences. Continuous studies are carried out both in the programs and in the learning processes in order to gain the features that should be found in the people of tomorrow. In this context, cognitive awareness, which means that the individual learns the ways of learning linguistic ways, in other words, the ability to regulate the individual's cognition and to think critically is considered to be one of the characteristics of the future person. For the first time, Flavell introduced the concept in 1976, using the term beyond memory in a study he conducted on children's advanced memory capabilities, and introduced this concept in his literature. In 1979 Flavell, who improved his work, reconstructed his theory, including the cognition. Together with Flavell's theory, studies on the cognitive studies continued until today. Although the concept of cognitive is expressed in different concepts and meanings, in general, the individual's knowledge about his / her own system, structure and work. The difference between cognition and cognition is cognition, being aware of something, understanding it while being cognitive, being aware of how they learn it, knowing how to learn it. The aim of this study is to determine the levels of cognitive awareness and critical thinking skills of the students and to examine the relationship between the two characteristics. For this purpose, questions were asked to what extent the levels of critical thinking and levels of cognitive awareness were different, and to what extent the levels of these two dependent variables differed according to independent variables such as gender, level of education and degree of study, academic success level 
and frequency of reading. A total of 534 students from 7 faculties and colleges of Erciyes University participated in this study. The lilik Adult Cognitive Ability Test miÅŸ which was used in the research was developed by Schraw and Dennison in 1994, translated into Turkish in Ozcan (2007) and carried out linguistic equivalence, validity and reliability studies. Schraw and Dennison discuss cognitive skills under two main headings: cognitive characteristics and cognitive skills. They formed 8 subdimensions (factors) for both sections. As a result of the factor analyzes, it was found appropriate to consider two factors as ası cognitive characteristics, cognitive skills regulation düzenlen in accordance with the first parts of the scale. The tedir Metacognitive Awareness Inventory (CPI) â€consists of 52 questions and is marked on a five-point Likert-type scale. The score range is 52-260. E California Critical Thinking Tendency Scale (CEDEÖ) iler was used to determine the students' critical thinking dispositions. The scale has 7 subscales and 51 items which are both theoretically determined and psychometrically tested. The adaptation of the scale to Turkish was done by Kökdemir (2003) on 913 students. The scale was prepared according to the 6 -point Likert type in the -I strongly disagree ’and ında fully agree†range. The lowest score that can be obtained from the scale is 51, and the highest score is 306. In addition, the personal information form, which contains information containing independent variables, was prepared by the researcher. Since the scales were applied to a similar group, a validity safety study was not performed and validity studies were accepted as sufficient. In order to determine the relationships between variables, the central correlation and the correlation coefficients were used. In order to determine the differences according to the independent variables, t-test and multiple comparisons were used to determine the differences. Post-Hoc test was used for hoc tests. Data were analyzed with SPSS 22 package program. In the analyzes, it is seen that the levels of both cognitive awareness and critical thinking are higher than the students.

Keywords: Critical thinking, reflective thinking, cognitive awareness