Determination of natural disaster literacy levels of special education school teachers working in Bitlis

The aim of this research was to determine the natural disaster literacy levels of special education school teachers working in the province of Bitlis. Analytically cross-sectional, this research was carried out with 138 teachers working in special education schools in the center and districts of Bitlis between October 2021 and December 2021. Data were collected using Demographic Information, Natural Disaster Literacy Behavior Scale, Natural Disaster Literacy Affective Tendency Scale, and Natural Disaster Literacy Achievement Test. Descriptive statistics, analysis of variance, t-test, One Way Anova Dunnett HSD test were used in the analysis of the data. The significance level of the data was taken as p<0.05. 44.2% of the teachers are female and 55.8% are male. The mean score of the natural disaster literacy behavior scale was 2.95±0.43, the mean score of the Affective Tendency Scale was 3.37±0.334, the mean of the Achievement Test score was 83.74±12.78. Statistically significant differences were found between the natural disaster literacy behavior level of the teachers and their knowledge of the institution's disaster plan (p=0.0001), participating in disaster-related activities (p=0.004) and knowing the emergency meeting place (p=0.0001) and between the success of the teachers and their willingness to participate in disaster-related activities (p=0.021) and knowing the emergency meeting place (p=0.015). In this study, it was concluded that while the natural disaster knowledge level of the special education school teachers working in Bitlis is very high, their behavioral and affective tendencies are lower than their knowledge levels, and the teachers cannot put their knowledge into action. Practice-based training should be provided to enable teachers to transform their knowledge about disasters into action. Keywords: Bitlis, Special Education, Natural Disaster, Natural Disaster Literacy