Abstract

Gardner’s “Five Minds for the Future” approach is focused on disciplined, synthesizing, creative, respectful, and ethical minds. Based on this approach, the purpose of this research is to determine senior secondary school students’ levels of five mind areas, and investigate the relationship between these mind areas and the students’ socioeconomic status, gender, professions they wish to have, favorite courses and disliked courses. This study is a descriptive and associational research in the form of a survey model. Scale for Determining Mind Areas (66 items) developed by the researcher, it has .81 Cr. α reliability coefficient. In the scale (N=528), explained variance for disciplined, synthesizing, creative, respectful, and ethical mind was 52.7, 46.5, 46.6, 53.0 and 46.6 respectively. The variance is 52.8. For determining socioeconomic level Bacanli’s scale was used. The findings showed that the students have “satisfactory” level of disciplined, synthesizing and creative minds and "medium" level of respectful and ethical minds.  Significant differences were found between students' mind area levels and their socioeconomic levels. Additionally, the students' mind areas differed significantly with respect to their genders and professions they wish to have. There is no significant difference between the professions students wish to have and their mind areas.

Key words:  Five minds, future, gender, individual differences, socioeconomic level.