With the spread of the philosophy for children approach developed by Lipman, the way of teaching philosophy has changed all over the world and it has started to be used as a teaching method in different courses. Since the application principles and aims of the approach overlap to a large extent with the Turkish lesson, philosophy for children is also used in Turkish lessons for purposes such as improving thinking, providing critical reading, and contributing to speaking skills. Since it is thought that the Turkish teachers who will carry out the application should receive education on this subject and that it will also be beneficial in terms of teacher education, it has been decided to carry out this application with Turkish pre-service teachers. In this study, it was aimed to examine the effect of philosophy for children and communities (P4C) on the critical thinking attitude and critical reading self-efficacy perception of Turkish pre-service teachers. In the study, which was prepared with a single-group pretest-posttest experimental design, the subjects were selected with easily accessible case sampling. The study group consists of 54 pre-service teachers studying in the department of Turkish language teaching at a state university. Philosophy for children program was applied to the participants for 7 weeks. In the research, critical thinking attitude scale and critical reading self-efficacy perception scale were used before and after the experimental procedure to collect data. In the analysis of the data, dependent sample t-test analysis was performed. As a result of the analysis, there was a significant difference in favor of the experimental group in terms of willingness to gather information, self-regulation and making inferences, while there was no significant difference in terms of evidence-based decision making and being open to search for a reason. In terms of critical reading self-efficacy perception, a statistically significant difference was found in terms of both the whole scale and sub-dimensions of questioning, making inferences, analysis, evaluation, finding similarities and differences.

Philosophy for children, philosophy for communities, critical thinking, critical reading.