Investigation of STEM education self-efficiency levels for pre-school teacher and elementry teacher candidates for gifted and talended students: İstanbul Aydin University example

STEM education is an education system which aims to provide students with 21st century skills by fictionalizing and living to find alternative new solutions for self-questioning and error detection. Supporting the development of gifted or high ability students and having an effective curriculum system for their social emotional needs is very important. When we entered the research on the subject, the lack of adequate research and publication on the subject in domestic and foreign sources in the literature has led us to work on this subject. In this study, it was aimed to examine the self-efficacy levels of pre-school teachers and classroom teachers with the help of scale. It was my main goal to determine the self-efficacy level of pre-school and elementry teacher candidates for STEM education, science, technology, engineering and mathematics. The study group consisted of 250 pre-service and pre-service teachers in Istanbul Aydın University Faculty of Education. The scale was prepared with the questions about elementry teachers' knowledge about gifted students, following academic publications, applying STEM activities and self-efficacy levels. The results were entered into the SPSS 19.0 program together with the data obtained from the teachers' demographic information and the draft attitude scale. In this framework, the item pool was converted into a 37-item draft scale. With this draft scale, two educational sciences experts, one assessor's opinions were consulted on whether the preschool teachers were sufficient to measure their self-efficacy to promote their mathematical development. It is seen that pre-service teachers' relation to STEM education is examined and the self-efficacy levels of teacher candidates has higher result than classroom teaching departments. On the other hand, it was found that there was no significant difference between the self-efficacy levels of the 3 rd and 4 th grade teachers. When we compare the self-efficacy levels of prospective teachers who have received STEM education and those who do not receive STEM education, STEM education teachers have more confidence in them, they can make mentorship and there are significant differences in their designs. For this reason, the high level of self-efficacy of teachers is important for the students to develop these skills. Keywords: STEM education, teacher education, self-efficacy level