Abstract

• The main purpose of this study is to investigate the reflective thinking skills and social problem abilities of pre-service teachers from Sagaing University of Education. Descriptive survey method and quantitative research design were used in this study. The specific objectives were to explore the differences between reflective thinking skills and social problem solving abilities of preservice teachers by gender, education level and subject stream and to investigate the relationship between reflective thinking skills and social problem solving abilities of pre-service teachers. A total of 935 pre-service teachers (male = 440 and female = 495) studied in first year, second year and third year pre-service teachers from Sagaing University of Education were selected as the participants of this study through simple random sampling technique. In this study, Reflective Thinking Questionnaire (Kember et al., 2000) and Social Problem Solving Inventory-Revised (D’Zurilla et al., 2002) were used respectively. According to the result, there were significant differences in pre-service teachers’ reflective thinking skills by gender, education level and subject stream. Reflective thinking skills of female pre-service teachers were higher than that of male preservice teachers. Furthermore, pre-service teachers who specialized Science (Stream 1) and Art (Stream 3) were better in reflective thinking skills than the pre-service teachers who specialized Art-science (Stream 2). And, there was significant difference in pre-service teachers’ social problem solving abilities by gender. Female pre-service teachers were significantly better in social problem solving abilities than male pre-service teachers. Finally, there was statistically significant positive correlation in reflective thinking skills and social problem solving abilities of pre-service teachers. Therefore, it could be said that pre-service teachers who had high reflective thinking skills were likely to have high social problem solving abilities.