A preliminary investigation into critical thinking of in-service and pre-service middle school chemistry teachers in Shaanxi province of China

Constructivist Views of Science Teaching and Learning

The result is rather close to our presuppose. The possible explanations for the finding could be related to limited teaching strategies and the learning milieu (Stockhausen and Kawashima, 2003). And the participants' prior educational and cultural backgrounds are very important (Asako & Marcia, 2004). Also the existing traditional values can affect people's critical thinking (Asako & Marcia, 2004).The curriculums taught in Chinese normal university are instructed by the subject-center thought. Middle school teachers in China take advantages on the ability of analyticity and systematicity. However, Chinese teachers get into the habit of strongly depending on textbooks and reference books. They think the textbook is the authority during the teaching, by which majority of them are not good at querying. So the scores of truth-seeking and open-minded subscale are low. High scores of self-confidence and inquisitiveness indicate that teachers become full of confidence to their work, they also showed a positive inclination towards intellectual curiosity and a desire for learning.

The most interesting finding is that the mean scores of the pre-service teachers are higher than the scores of in-service teachers both on CCTDI and CCTST. It seems to that working experience is not beneficial to CT. It can be found in other fields like nursing (Asako & Marcia, 2004). Maybe the in-service have a lot of things to do just as working and family affairs, there is no time to think critically and young people have a strong learning desire than the elder (Zhou & Wang, 2007).

See table 3, it is reassuring that the majority (61%) of the teachers in this current study achieved CCTDI scores of 280-350 because "critical thinking dispositions are essential for the development of higher-order critical thinking and learning". (Colucciello, 1999). In a word, majority teachers' dispositions toward critical thinking are at a high-average level.

Furthermore, as shown in table 1, we find that analysis score is high while evaluation and inference scores are low. Significant differences only can be found on Analysis subscale (p = 0.015), compared with no significant difference on Evaluation ( p = 0.137) and Inference ( p = 0.079). Both in-service and pre-service teachers have the highest mean scores for Analyticity, at 46.79 and 47.08 respectively, indicating that they were inclined to anticipate consequences and demand the application of reason (Facione, 1997; Colucciello, 1997). The possible explanations could be chemistry is a subject based on experiment; it is very common to use the ability of analysis. In addition, the method of inducting and analyzing are the most essential method in chemistry subject, thus probably resulting in the teachers' high score of analysis. The in-service teachers studied are positively disposed to Inquisitiveness, Systematicity, CT-confidence, with the mean score separately are 45.72, 43.36 and 42.80, but ambivalent toward Open-mindedness (38.91), Maturity (38.16), Truth-seeking (37.62). While the pre-service teachers positively disposed to Inquisitiveness (46.26), Systematicity (43.24), CT self-confidence (43.18), Maturity (40.23), and ambivalent toward Open-mindedness and Truth-seeking. It is rather unconceivable the maturity of the pre-service teacher is higher than that of in-service teacher. Is the elder not mature? It is not consistent with other papers (Zoller, Fastow, Lubezky & Tsaparlis, 1998). Maybe the in-service teachers are too cautious to present their real characteristics.

Table 3 Percentage distribution of CCTDI degree
	<210	210-280	280-350	>350
N	0	46	79	5
Percentage(N/the total N)	0%	35%	61%	4%