Pre-school teacher candidates' scientific process skills affect self-efficacy beliefs toward attitudes and teaching towards science and mathematics

The purpose of this research is to examine the relationship between preschool teacher candidates's scientific process skills, attitudes towards science and mathematics teaching and self-efficacy beliefs. The study is a descriptive study based on a relationship between science process skills, attitudes towards science and mathematics teaching and self efficacy beliefs of preschool teacher candidates. The research was conducted with the 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th grade students studying at Dokuz Eylül University, Preschool Teaching Department in 2017-2018 school year. In order to collect data in the research, the Scientific Process Skill Test was used to measure the scientific process skill of preschool teachers, the Science Instruction Attitude Scale to measure attitudes towards science teaching mathematics, the self efficacy beliefs about science teaching mathematics, the self efficacy beliefs about science teaching Science Teachers's Self Efficacy Belief Scale way used to measure the self-efficacy beliefs about mathematics teaching, and the Self-Efficacy Perception Scale for Preschool Teachers's Mathematics Teaching Scale was used. In the research SPSS 22 was used for analysis of the study. As a result of the study, it was observed that pre-school teacher candidates had middle-level science process skills, a positive attitude towards science teaching; high self-efficacy beliefs towards science teaching, middle level attitudes towards mathematics teaching and high self-efficacy beliefs in mathematics teaching. It was determined that a positive and middle-level relation between science process skills and self-efficacy beliefs towards science teaching; a middle-level positive relation between science process skills and attitudes towards mathematics teaching; a positive and low-level relation between science process skills and self-efficacy beliefs towards mathematics teaching. Key Words: Pre-school Education, Pre-school Teacher Candidates, Attitude Towards Science Teaching, Attitude Towards Mathematics Teaching, Science Process Skills, Self-Efficacy Belief