Evaluation of empathic tendency and empathic skill levels of pre-service teachers who study in physical education and sports department: The case of Anadolu University

Empathy is the process in which someone puts himself/herself in someone else's place in order to understand that person's feelings and thoughts, and communicate that understanding to them correctly. In relation to that, empathic tendency is an individual's potential to develop empathy while empathic skill is an individual's ability to show a person that their feelings are understood. The aim of this study was to investigate the levels of empathic tendency and empathic skill of physical education and sports pre-service teachers. The participants were 141 (female 60, male 81) students who were in their first, second, third, and fourth year in the Physical Education and Sports Teaching Department within the Sport Science Faculty of Anadolu University in the fall semester of 2015-2016 academic year. For this descriptive study, "Personal Info Form", "Empathic Tendency Scale" and "Empathic Skill Scale-B Form" have been used as data collection tools. The data was analyzed using arithmetic mean, standard deviation, t test (for double comparisons), and "one way ANOVA" (for multiple comparisons). The results revealed that empathic tendency and empathic skill levels of pre-sevice teachers were medium. While the relationship between participants' scores of empathic tendency and empathic skills was low negative (r=-.073) that finding was not significant (p>.05). Furthermore, there was no significant difference between pre-service teachers' empathic skills scores and "gender", "study year", "parents' levels of education and their occupation", "situation of doing active sports", "level of doing sports", "whether they chose to study in that program willingly or not", and "their perceptions of the importance of empathy for teaching profession". The results were the same for the comparisons of above variables to pre-service teachers scores of empathic tendency with the exception of the variable: "whether they chose to study in that program willingly or not". It can be concluded that pre-service teachers' empathic skill levels are below the desired level for teaching and that there is a need to provide pre-service teachers with more opportunities to develop their empathic skills.