Abstract

• The focus of this paper is to investigate Taungoo Education College pre-service teacher trainees’ knowledge about the general concepts of critical thinking, including its skills. Moreover, this study explored their perceptions about critical thinking regarding implementation in the classrooms with a purpose of promoting teaching1 and learning process. The participants in this study were from two teacher education programmes at Taungoo Education College: 1) Certificate in Teacher Education students and 2) Diploma in Teacher Education students at Taungoo Education College. The study was conducted with 36 male trainees and 36 female trainees from each programme. Therefore, totally 72 trainees participated in this study. The quantitative method was used, employing a three-part instrument. The quantitative data was analyzed with SPSS software program (ver. 25.0), using sums, means and standard deviations of pre-service teacher trainees’ responses on the questionnaires. Two sets of questionnaire survey were used to investigate the pre-service teacher trainees’ knowledge about the general concept of critical thinking and its skills, and their teaching perceptions. The first set consists of three sections adopted from Elder et al (2007), and Al-degether (2009) whereas the second one is a 5 point Likert scale which was revised by Stedman and Adams (2012). According to the findings of the current study, pre-service teacher trainees who were enrolled at Taungoo Education College were found to have knowledge about critical thinking skills to some extent. However, the present study proved that pre-service teacher trainees held positive perceptions about the value of teaching critical thinking. The current study recommends that critical thinking skills should be emphasized in teacher education preparation programmes in order that pre-service teacher trainees themselves achieve 21st century skills and promote critical thinking in their future classrooms.