1
Selçuk University, Faculty of Education, Konya, Türkiye
Abstract
This study was conducted to determine how university students construct the concept of critical thinking. In this context, the research design was determined to be phenomenology, one of the qualitative research designs. The study group consisted of 85 undergraduate students taking the “Critical and Analytical Thinking” course at a state university in Türkiye. Data were collected through an open-ended question posed to participants: “Critical thinking is like... because...”. This sentence allowed participants to express their understanding of critical thinking through a metaphor and to support their comparisons with a brief explanation. The metaphors obtained in the study were analysed, and the students’ perceptions of critical thinking were classified under five themes: argument, development, discovery, perspective, and questioning. The analysis revealed that the theme “Questioning” generated the most metaphors among university students. Conversely, the theme with the fewest metaphors was “Argumentation”, and the number of metaphors in this theme was significantly lower than in other themes. The findings reveal that students approach critical thinking from different angles and interpret this process through different conceptual frameworks.
Keywords
Critical thinking,metaphor analysis,phenomenology,philosophy,university students
How to Cite
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