Effect of Metacognitive Reading Strategies on Critical Thinking: A Mixed Methods Research

Abstract

This study aims at determining whether there were differences in the critical thinking skills of 6th-grade students with whom different metacognitive reading strategies were implemented in Turkish language courses. The Mixed research methodology was adopted that consists of quantitative and qualitative methods. Critical thinking applications in the control group of the study took place according to the Turkish language curriculum, whereas the applications in the experimental group were conducted through SQ4R (survey, question, read, recite, record, and review) and Interactive Read Aloud (IRA) strategies. In the quantitative part of the study, 95 students from 3 different classes attended the practice for 8 weeks, while in the qualitative part semi-structured interviews were held with 32 students in the experimental group. Quantitative data was analyzed on SPSS 22 software package, and MAXQDA 12 software program was employed for the analysis of qualitative data. It was concluded, upon a comparison of post-test scores of students who were taught the SQR4 strategy and the IRA strategy with the scores of those in the control group, that there was a significant difference in favor of the students who applied the IRA strategy in which the teacher acts as a model. No significant difference was observed between the teacher-guided experimental group applying the SQ4R strategy and the control group. Both quantitative and qualitative findings support this conclusion. All students from the IRA experimental group who participated in interviews stated that the strategy applied improved their critical thinking skills in different aspects, whereas most of the students in the SQ4R group stated that the strategy applied did not contribute to their skills.