Abstract

• The main purpose of this study is to study the correlation between students’ critical thinking skills and their mathematics achievement at the middle school level. Especially, this study aims to study students’ critical thinking skills in mathematics in terms of analysis, synthesis and evaluation level of Bloom’s cognitive domain. A descriptive research design was used for this study. Four townships were randomly selected from four districts in Yangon Region. Twelve schools (eight high schools and four middle schools) were randomly selected from the four townships. The participants in this study included (600) Grade Eight students. As instruments, a test for critical thinking skills and a test for mathematics achievement were used. To obtain the reliability of these instruments, a pilot test was administered. The internal consistency (Cronbach’s Alpha) of the test for students ‘critical thinking skills was (.782) and of the test for students’ mathematic achievement was (.807). In order to address the research questions, a descriptive statistics (percentage) and Pearson product-moment correlation were used. The percentage of low, moderate and high levels of students’ critical thinking skills were 13.7% (N=82), 70.1% (N=421) and 16.2% (N=97) respectively. The percentage of low, moderate and high levels of students’ mathematics achievement were 22.7% (N=136), 65.3% (N=392) and 12.0% (N=72) respectively. And also there was a positive correlation between students’ critical thinking skills and their mathematics achievement (r = .748, p < .01).