The Impact of Inquiry Teaching Method on Growing Philosophical Thinking Skills of Fifth Grade students in Experimental Science Curriculum

The main purpose of this paper is survey of inquiry teaching method influence on growth of fifth grade students’ philosophical thinking skills. Method of this re-search is quasi – experimental. Statistical population is all of the fifth grade stu-dents in Bahar town in 88-89 academic year. The statistical population include 1020 students (620 girls and 500 boys). In this study by using of clustering sam-pling method a sample with number of 96 students including 52 girls and 44 boys from two schools were selected in four classrooms. The data gathering tool was researcher-made questionnaire for measurement of psychological thinking. Deter-mination of validity of tool and questionnaire was done through experts' viewpoints in form of content validity and its reliability was about 0.79% through alpha Cronbach method. Collected data were analyzed through t-tests and descriptive statistics indices within independent groups and mutual variance analysis. Findings showed that there is significant difference between average philosophical thinking skills of students in control and experimental groups. Philosophical thinking and its components in fifth grade students whom are familiar with inquiry method in experimental science is more than that of students trained by traditional teaching method. Therefore, inquiry teaching method increases students' philosophical thinking skills in experimental groups. Moreover, research findings indicate that in experimental group, there are not any significant differences between philosophical thinking skills and their components among girl and boy students except comprehensiveness feature.