Case study for elementary school teacher candidates' cyberloafing behaviors

The main goal of the study is to investigate teacher candidates' cyberloafing behaviors during a lesson, the reasons that lead them to such behavior and possible solutions to minimize those behaviors from teacher candidates' perspectives. The participants consisted of elementary school teacher candidates who continued their education at Firat University during 2015-2016 school year. In order to identify cyberloafing behaviors of the participants a survey originally developed by Blach and Henle (2008), and translated into Turkish by Kalaycı (2010) was administered. Also, open ended questions were asked to the participants related to the reasons that lead them to show cyberloafing behavior and possible solutions from their perspectives. For daily routines and in class routines with mobile technologies, frequencies were calculated. Content analysis were used for qualitative data. According to the results, in daily life participants did the following activities at most: listening to music, watching videos, and accessing to social networking sites. In addition, during a lesson, participants use their cell phones or other school technologies to check their social media accounts, to download files, and to skim newspaper websites. The qualitative data were examined based on four main factors: lecturer, course content, students themselves, and classroom environment related reasons of cyberloafing behaviors and possible solutions tominimize those behaviors. Regarding to the findings of the current study, suggestions are provided to researchers, teachers, and educational institutions.