An examination on mental rotation and problem solving skills of physical education teachers: Sample of Bursa

In this study it is aimed to examine P. E teachers' mental rotation and problem solving skills in terms of some variants. 105 P. E teachers from private and government schools of Bursa region, consisting of 30 female and 75 male, voluntarily participated in the study. In this study as a tool of gathering data, personal information form developed by researchers ,"Probem Solving Inventory, Form A" developed by Heppner and Petersen and applied in Turkish by Şahin, Şahin and Heppner (1993) (PÇE) and computer based Mental Rotation (MR) Performance Test belonging to "Stimulus Library", is applied to P. E. teachers. (Peters & Battista, 2008). In the analysis of acquired data SPSS23 package program was used. In the study the convenience of constant variants to normal distribution was tested by Shapiro - Wilk test. Defining statistics for the constant variants fitting into normal distribution are indicated as average (-, +) standard deflection. T test and One Way ANOVA tests were used in intergroup comparisons of constant variants. The statistical meaningfulness level is accepted p<0.05. Participant teachers' problem solving skills and subdimensions were detected as mid level and the mental rotation performance levels were detected as similar level.While there was no difference in problem solving skills of P. E teachers in terms of age, gender and experience, a meaningful difference was detected in problem solving skill's precipitation sub dimension in favour of the married according to marital status. A meaningful difference at statistical level was detected in favour of age variant in mental rotation performance level's average time value. (p<0,05) As a result, while problem solving skills of P. E teachers are detected as particularly at high level among 1-5 year experienced group, mental rotation average time was detected high among 42-46 years of age group.