Associating entrepreneurship characteristics of science teacher candidates with creative thinking and critical thinking tendencies

Teachers who educate future generations need to be trained as well-equipped individuals in every field. It is important for science teachers, who are especially involved with science and constantly research, criticize, question and produce new solutions, to approach this issue more carefully. Considering these, the aim of the research is to examine the entrepreneurial characteristics of science teacher candidates by correlating them with creative thinking and critical thinking tendencies and by examining them in terms of various variables. The research model is a screening model from quantitative research methods. The universe of the study consists of all science teacher candidates studying in the Science Education program in Turkey. The sample of the study consists of 290 teacher candidates at all levels studying at Siirt, Dicle and RTE Universities between the years 2023-2024. The scales used in the study are the Entrepreneurship Scale for Teacher Candidates, the Critical Thinking Tendencies Scale and the Marmara Creative Thinking Tendency Scale. 290 data were obtained from the scales, 8 of which were missing. The data's kurtosis and skewness values, KMO and Bartlett's Test values and Levene's Test values were examined. According to the findings obtained as a result of the analyses, it was found that emotional intelligence had a medium-level effect in favor of women with a Cohen d value of .41, curiosity had a small effect on both university and class, and flexibility had a small effect only on class. As a result of the research, it was concluded that entrepreneurship and tendencies had high-level averages and there was a positive correlation between them. In the literature, studies that were both similar and different from the findings obtained were found. Future researchers can investigate why the emotional intelligence sub-dimension showed a medium-level significant difference for female candidates according to the findings obtained. At the same time, they can seek an answer to the question "Why is Emotional Intelligence lower in male candidates and what can be done to increase it?"