An analysis on value judgements of science teacher candidates

People in their own environment make conceptual definitions as good-bad, right-wrong; through this way they learn to form their own moral principles. Those acquired concepts form a whole set of beliefs called values. Within this scope, the aim of the study is to reveal the value judgments of Science Teacher Candidates who have an important mission in shaping the future and develop some suggestions accordingly. In this research, descriptive model is used. The research was conducted at Süleyman Demirel University and Burdur Mehmet Akif Ersoy University in the fall semester of 2018-2019 academic year. Research population consists of science teachers studying at state universities in Turkey. Sampling method is used due to the wide range of population. Considering the accessibility of the study, convenience sampling method is used. In this context, Isparta Süleyman Demirel University and Burdur Mehmet Akif Ersoy University Science Teacher Candidates form the sample of the study. An attitude scale has been developed by the researcher for use in this research, which aims to reveal the value judgments of prospective science teachers. 5 point Likert scale; "1"never, "2" rarely, "3" occasionally, "4" frequently, "5" very frequently is used. The scale consists of two parts. The first part of the study consists of variables such as; gender, class, residence, science teacher presence in the family, parents professions, after how many attempts you passed the university exam, number of siblings, aim to prefer your university department, values a science teacher should possess, whether to give values education in science classes; while in the second part 42 items aiming to reveal the value judgments of the candidates are given. An item pool was created for the scale by face to face interview with prospective science teachers. The final version of the scale is formed after having interviews with 3 faculty members from Süleyman Demirel and Burdur Mehmet Akif Ersoy University who work in this field. In order to determine the validity and reliability of the scale, pre-application was performed with 120 students. As a result of the reliability of the scale, the Cronbach alpha value was ,89. Factor analysis was performed in order to determine the validity of the scale. KMO and Bartlett's test results were examined to determine whether the scale was suitable for factorization before starting the analysis. KMO (,888) and Bartlett's test values showed that the scale data were suitable for factorization. As a result of factor analysis, 5 items with factor loads below ,40 were removed and finalized to scale. Arithmetic mean, frequency, percentage, factor loads, t test and anova statistics were used to analyze the data. Prospective science teachers generally responded positively to 37 items in the scale prepared by the researcher. According to the five-point Likert-type scale, a value close to 4,13 was found. This average corresponds to "frequently" range. Regarding the variabilities in the scale, another result is the following: The value judgments of science teacher candidates do not change in terms of class, residence, science teacher presence in the family, parents' professions, after how many attempts you passed the university exam, number of siblings, aim to prefer your university department, values a science teacher should possess. However, there are some differences in terms of giving value education in gender and science class. In terms of gender, girls value judgments were more positive than men. Again, the value of the value judgments of teacher candidates who think that it would be good to give value education in science lesson is more positive than those who do not.