Examination of pre-service teachers' self-efficacy beliefs and computational thinking skills

The aim of this study is to examine the self-efficacy beliefs of teacher candidates and their computational thinking skills and the relationship between them. Self-efficacy and computational thinking skills of pre-service teachers in the research; gender, age, department, class, weighted grade point averages, and the type of high school they graduated from. The place where they were born and raised, their school satisfaction, reasons for choosing a profession, worldview, taking courses related to programming, duration of internet use and purpose of using the internet were also examined. Relational screening design, one of the quantitative methods, was used in the research. The universe of this research consists of 848 teacher candidates studying at Mehmet Akif Ersoy University Faculty of Education in the 2021-2022 academic year. Personal Information Form prepared by the researcher, Teacher Self-Efficacy Belief Scale and Computational Thinking Scale were used to collect data. In this study, the Cronboach Alpha reliability coefficient of the self-efficacy scale was .94; The Cronboach Alpha reliability coefficient of the computational thinking scale was determined as .87. The data were analyzed with a computer package program. Descriptive statistics were used in the analysis of the data, Mann Whitney U test was used in unrelated pairwise samples without normal distribution, and Kruskal Wallis H test was used in data containing more than two unrelated samples. Bonferroni corrected multiple comparison test was used to find the difference between multiple samples and Spearman Correlation analysis was used to examine the relationship between variables. According to the results of the research, pre-service teachers' self-efficacy beliefs and computational skill levels were found to be "high". It was found that there was a moderately positive and significant relationship between the self-efficacy belief scale and the computational thinking scale. Gender and graduated high school did not make a significant difference in either scale. In the CC scale, it was seen that the programming course status and the purpose of using the internet caused a significant difference.