Despite the fact that developing critical thinking represents an important task of mathematics education, there are
numerous open questions when it comes to its realization. One part of these problems stems from its generalization
and indeterminancy, another from the lack of a clear strategy for its development. In this paper, we attempted to
operationalize the concept of critical thinking in the context of elementary mathematics education, through specific
skills that are emphasized during work with mathematical content and to examine if a more purposeful selection of
content can influence the development of critical thinking.
Obtained results indicate that students’ critical thinking can be successfully encouraged and developed in
elementary mathematics education by the selection of content (tasks), the solution of which emphasizes skills of
critical thinking in all students, and that we should not make any limitations regarding the classification of studnets
by their overall achievement in school. In addition, the greatest progress in the development of critical thinking was
achieved with students who had the best overall achievement, but it should be noted, that this is possible with all
student groups. The results should offer a clearer orientation to all involved in mathematics education in the process
of selecting the content by which they want to achieve certain objectives in teaching. We hop we encouraged other
authors to study the issue of developing critical thinking in elementary mathematics education, but also teachers and
textbook authors to pay more attention to selection of the content for elementary mathematics education.