An analysis of pre-service teacher's perceptions about child rights in terms of some variables

In today's modern society, children and children's rights are one of the important issues that need to be addressed with sensitivity. In this context, the subject of the research is to learn how knowledgeable the prospective teachers who are studying in the faculties of education are about the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child and how much they adopt the basic principles of the convention. The aim of this study is to reveal the opinions of prospective teachers who are studying in faculties of education towards child rights. The target population of the study consists of all the students studying at the faculties of education at Van Yüzüncü Yıl University, Gazi University and Akdeniz University. The study group consists of 1271 prospective teachers who were educated at the faculties of Van Yüzüncü Yıl University, Gazi University and Akdeniz University in 2016-2017 academic year and who were determined by simple random sampling method. In order to determine the opinions of prospective teachers about child rights, a questionnaire called "Opinions of Prospective Teachers on Child Rights" developed by Kaya (2011) was used as data collection tool. The assessment instrument consists of two parts. The first part is about the personal information of the participants. The second part consists of the survey questions. It was checked whether the questionnaire includes extreme values or not. Then, in order to make valid and reliable analyses, it was checked whether or not there is any missing data and no missing data was detected. In order to check whether normality assumptions were met, the skewness-kurtosis coefficient was examined separately for all items in the data set. It was decided to use nonparametric tests as the distrubiton was not normal. Therefore, in order to determine whether there is a statistically significant difference among the opinions obtained from the participants in terms of personal variables, Mann Whitney-U and Kruskall Wallis non-parametric tests and frequency and percentage calculations which are descriptive statistics were used by means of SPSS package program. According to the findings of the study, it was found that most of the prospective teachers did not read the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child and did not receive any training on child rights or human rights before. According to the results obtained from the responses of the teacher candidates to the items, it was found that there were significant differences in terms of the variables such as gender, university, type of program, place of residence, class level, preference of branch and income status of families.