Investigation of the critical leadership scores of candidate teachers by parental education levels

The quality of the family environment in which candidate teachers have been raised plays an important role in shaping their future. Therefore, it is extremely important to investigate the teachers who have an essential role in shaping the society and what kind of family structure they have come from. In this context, the importance of the concepts family and teacher in terms of their influence on the students makes the parental education status of the candidate teachers a topic worth studying. In this regard, the aim of this study is to investigate the effect of parental education level of candidate teachers on the levels of critical leadership. The present study has been designed as a survey model. The study group includes 497 students studied at Nevşehir Hacı Bektaş Veli University in 2015–2016 academic year. Critical leadership scale was used as data collection tool. In this study, while the critical leadership scores of the candidate teachers did not differ significantly according to the mother’s education level, there was a significant difference in the paternal education level. When examining that the difference in the paternal education level results from which pairwise group, there was a significant difference between the critical leadership scores of candidate teachers whose fathers graduated from “primary school university” and “secondary school university.” This difference has been found in favor of candidate teachers who graduated from primary school and secondary school, respectively. We can infer from these results that while the paternal education level reduces, the critical thinking levels of candidate teachers increase. © Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature 2019.