A Review of Relationship between Prospective Science Teachers' Attitudes towards Science Education and Their Self-Efficacy

Abstract

In this research, we aim to review relationship between prospective science teachers' attitudes against science education (physics, chemistry, biology, laboratory) and their self-efficacy. Population of the research constitutes 497 students studying Science Education in Department of Elementary Education in Celal Bayar University Faculty of Education. In this research, general survey method is utilized, and "Science Teaching Self-Efficacy Beliefs Scale" developed by Enochs and Rings (1990) and adopted into Turkish by Özkan, Tekkaya and Çakıroğlu (2002) and "Science Teaching Attituted Scale" developed by researchers is used for data collection. For statistical analyses of data collected; descriptive statistical methods (arithmetic mean, ± standard deviation, frequency, percentage) as well as independent samples T-test, one-way anova LSD test and correlation analysis is used. As concluded from the analyses; a significant difference by gender as well as class level variations is observed in prospective teachers' attitudes towards science education in terms of their general attitude scores, while no observed significant difference is present with respect to variations of their success level and the high school they graduated. Prospective teachers' self-efficacy scores towards science teaching significantly differ by the class level variant, while variants of gender, success status and type of high school they graduated does not make a statistically significant difference. Moreover, a positively significant but low linear correlation between prospective teachers' attitudes towards science education and their self-efficacy points is identified.