Rezgar Mohammadi, Ezatollah Naderi, Ali Shariyatmadari and Maryam Seif Naraghi
The aim of the present study is to investigate the effect of centralized planning system on the development of critical thinking in elementary school students. This study is an applied one. The population of the study is elementary school students of Kurdistan province (F=10496 and M=10950). The sample of this study was selected according to the nature and characteristics of the target population using multi-stage cluster sampling and stratified sampling procedures. The sample consists of 220 elementary school students. The instrument used in this study was the Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking questionnaire. The results of this study indicate that centralized planning system leads to decreased ability to deduce, decreased ability to infer, deduced ability to interpret, decreased ability in the evaluation of logical reasoning, and decreased ability in the identification of assumptions (p ≤ 0.01).