Postgraduate Students' Perceptions of Research Self-Efficacy and Critical Thinking Disposition and their Impact on Academic Creativity: Case of Mersin University

Abstract

Postgraduate education plays a key role in assessing the welfare level of today's societies and in the process of creating labor in line with the social development needs of developing countries. The structure of this educational process requires graduates to be individuals that possess scientific research competencies, critical thinking skills who can create original academic studies. In this study, it was aimed to determine the self-efficacy, critical thinking dispositions and academic creativity of postgraduate students and to investigate their effects on academic creativity and; descriptive and relational survey model were used. Due to the factor analysis' findings, the sub-dimensions of both the Critical Thinking Disposition Scale and the Academic Creativity Scale differed, and the research hypotheses were arranged according to these new sub-dimensions. According to the findings, while the research self-efficacy of the students had a high impact on their academic creativity, it was found that the engagement sub-dimension of critical thinking dispositions could affect the investigative creativity. These results showed the role of research techniques education in postgraduate studies. In addition, the complex and multifactorial structure of the phenomenon of creativity has validated itself at the academic level, but new research is needed on how academic creativity is affected by different factors.