Design, implementation and evaluation of the 21st century skills curriculum based on the flip learning approach

In today's world, rapid developments in every field, especially in technology, change all the dynamics of personal life, business world and social life dramatically. Therefore, it involves 21st century skills, whose acquisition by all individuals is of critical importance to be able to live in this century. In this regard, the aim of this study was to develop 21st Century Skills Curriculum that the undergraduate programs at the faculty of education can use, and to raise the awareness of pre-service teachers about 21st century skills within the scope of this program, and to ensure that they attach importance to these skills in every part of their professional life. In this context, a program development study was carried out for education faculties to be implemented in the spring semester of the 2021-2022 academic year. Following a detailed needs analysis process, the philosophy, the general features and the general objectives of the 21st Century Skills Curriculum were determined based on the 21st century learning and the FLIP learning approaches. Then, the gains, the content, the teaching-learning and the evaluation processes of the 21st Century Skills Curriculum were created. Afterwards, the 21st Century Skills Curriculum was applied to the pre-service teachers for a semester in an elective course opened within a faculty of education, and the curriculum was evaluated through process and product evaluation approaches. Thus, the concurrent mixed design based on intervention (experiment) was used in this study as diverse quantitative and qualitative methods, including document analysis technique, 21st Century Competencies Scale, interview forms and diaries developed by the researcher, were used together. While the quantitative data obtained from the research were analysed with the SPSS 21.0 package program, the content analysis was carried out for the qualitative data of the research. The 21st Century Skills Curriculum was implemented as planned, and the findings of the research indicated that the acquisition and the awareness of the pre-service teachers about 21st Century skills increased, that their misconceptions about 21st skills were corrected, that within the scope of the FLIP learning approach, the out-of-class instructional practices supported the acquisition of 21st Century skills, and the in-class learning methods enabled a creative and high-level classroom atmosphere, and that the pre-service teachers would try to emphasize 21st century skills in their future courses. In conclusion, the 21st Century Skills Curriculum should be used in education faculties in order to improve the acquisition and the awareness of the pre-service teachers about the 21st century skills. It is also recommended that various 21st century skills curriculums for each of the 21st century skills or for various faculties and colleges should be developed, these skills in other undergraduate courses taken by pre-service teachers should be emphasized, and further research on teaching 21st century skills should be conducted. Keywords: 21st Century Skills, FLIP learning, Curriculum Development, Pre-service Teacher