Supporting the development of critical thinking in early childhood education

The purpose of this thesis was to examine critical thinking and how the development of a child’s critical thinking skills can be supported in early childhood. The theoretical framework in this thesis consists of early childhood education in Finland, critical thinking from philosophical view and theories of child’s cognitive development. Data collection in this thesis was done by using literature review. The aim was to answer the following research questions: How is it possible to support the development of critical thinking skills amongst children within the age of 0-6 and which methods adapted to early childhood education support the development of critical thinking? Literature review data was analyzed by using content analysis to gain more insights on the topic. Data collection was conducted with Ebook central, EBSCOhost combined, Finna, Google scholar, Sciencedirect (Elseviewer) and Proquest central. Content analysis method allowed to understand the gathered data by exploring the concepts and helped to gain more in-depth understanding of critical thinking, how its development can be supported and get a glimpse of why it is important to do so in early childhood. There was a decent amount of suitable literature material for my topic. This means I was able to go through the literature search material and find what I needed for my review. However, there were only 5 suitable researches. The main findings demonstrated that critical thinking is formed by a set of skills and attributes which can be developed already early in life. Early childhood educators have an important role with choosing the most suitable methods and maintaining an environment which fosters the development of critical thinking. This literature review is suitable for anyone working in the field of early childhood or to caregivers interested in development of critical thinking