Developing Critical Thinking in Elementary Mathematics Education through a Suitable Selection of Content and Overall Student Performance

Authors of this paper draw attention to the importance of developing critical thinking in the process of education. For this purpose, we organized a research (an experiment with parallel groups) on a sample (N=246) of third-grade students of primary school, to examine if critical thinking can be developed by a better planned selection of content. The obtained results show that the selection of content can encourage and develop critical thinking of all students, and that there should be no restrictions regarding the classification of students by their overall performance at school. (C) 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.