The relationship between the locus of control and thinking styles of teacher candidates

Abstract

The purpose of the current study was to explore the relationship between the thinking styles and locus of control situations of university students. In addition, the differences in students' academic achievement levels according to their thinking styles and locus of control were searched.  Differences in thinking styles and locus of control levels were also sought according to some study variables such as age, gender, parents' education level, the place most of the lifetime spent, and economical status.

A descriptive correlational research design was applied in this research. The sample of the study was 131 teacher candidates, enrolled in Gaziosmanpaşa University in 2006-2007 education years in Tokat, Turkey. It was tried to reach all teacher candidates enrolled in the department, therefore no sampling approach was taken. In this study, Locus of Control Scale, developed by Rotter (1966) and adapted to Turkish by Dağ (1991) and Thinking Styles Inventory, developed by Sternberg and Wagner (1991), adapted to Turkish by Sünbül (2004) were utilized. Locus of control scale is designed to measure to assess a person's internal and external locus of control. The higher the scores in the scale, the locus of control is external. On the other hand, the thinking styles inventory measures a person's level of use of 13 thinking styles as legislative, executive, judicial, monarchic, hierarchic, oligarchic, anarchic, global, local, internal, external, liberal and conservative thinking style.
In order to analyze the data, one way MONOVA, Pearson Product Correlation Coefficient, independent group t-test and ANOVA were used.
The results are provided in two parts. In the first part, the results for the correlations among the locus of control and thinking styles were provided. The findings were summarized under three headings in the second part. First, it was searched whether there were differences when the dependent variables (locus of control and thinking styles) used together. Second the differences for each dependent variable separately were investigated. Last, the differences in locus of control levels and thinking styles were provided according to some independent variables.
Findings indicated that there were negative relationships between students' locus of control and their use of local and hierarchic thinking style. The higher the scores on Locus of Control scale, people used more external locus of control. On the other hand the negative correlations meant more external control use. Therefore, as the students get older, the more local and less hierarchic thinking styles were used. The results also indicated there was no relationship between the age and locus of control level. Therefore, it cannot be concluded that people use more external control as they get older. The relationships between the thinking styles inventory sub-scale levels, age variable were explored, and it was found that the level of local thinking style increases with age while the level of anarchic thinking style decreases. On the other hand, the relationships between the academic achievement and thinking styles showed that the students with low academic achievement levels use anarchic thinking style. According to the independent group t-test results, there were not any statistically significant differences in students' academic achievement levels according to locus of control status. The differences in thinking styles according to external or internal locus of control use were also checked through MONOVA test and it was found that there were not any differences.  On the sub-scale levels, there were differences in local and hierarchic thinking styles according to the locus of control status.
In this study, the locus of control and thinking style levels were also compared according to the education level of parents, the place student spent most of his/her life, and gender variable. The results of Kruskal Wallis H test indicated that there were differences in students'conservative thinking styles according to gender variable. The findings indicated that male students had higher conservative thinking styles. Anarchic thinking style use was differentiated according to environment most of the lifetime spent. According to findings, the smaller the place lived, the more anarchic thinking style one seemed to be used. Holistic and hierarchic thinking style uses were differentiated according to the mother's education level variable.  On the other hand, conservative and external thinking style use seemed to differ according to father's education level variable. Hierarchic thinking style use was also differentiated by economical situation variable. Findings indicated that the more money family had, the less students applied hierarchic thinking style. The same was also true for students from low income earning families.
 The results were important by showing that thinking styles and locus of control were closely related to each other and there were number of factors, related to a person's locus of control and thinking styles.