Evaluation of the education faculty students according to the OECD-New Millennium Learners criteria

The current research is aimed to investigate the ?New Millennium Learner? levels of the teacher candidates in Turkey through their viewpoints about themselves. The term ?New Millennium Learner? is used as defining the new generation people who use computers and Internet frequently in their daily life according to the OECD resources.Research population is comprised of the undergraduate students both first and fourth grades students from in the education faculties of the universities in Turkey.Stratified random sampling is used as sampling method for the research. And the participants from the six universities are selected as follows: Marmara University, Mersin University, Celal Bayar University, Abant İzzet Baysal University, Erciyes University, Erzincan University. Moreover, for pilot test of the research, participants Anadolu University and Osmangazi University are selected.A survey form with 38 items is developed after the pilot test, factor analysis and opinions of the expert. Then, this survey is applied to the teacher candidates who are first and fourth grades of the undergraduate students in education faculties in selected universities.Return rate of the survey is 53 %. After the checking the survey forms, 5122 survey form is left and finally valid return rate of the survey is 51 %.Exploratory and causal comparative techniques are carried out as the research methodology. Descriptive statistics, internal validity tests, t-tests, test of homogeneity of variance, One way ANOVA tests are used during the data analysis process.After the data analysis, the results are found as follows;Being ?New Millennium Learner? levels of teacher candidates are varied according to their gender, class, department, university and family income levels.Generally, teacher candidates respond positively to the ?New Millennium Learner? characteristics. They show these characteristics positive over the neutral level.Levels of the ?Alternative Cognitive Skills? and ?Expectancies About Teaching and Learning? of the teacher candidates are positive.The lowest scores of the survey are appeared in the ?Social Cultural Attributes? dimension. Viewpoints of the teacher candidates about ?Social Cultural Attributes? are appeared below the neutral level.The expectancies of the teacher candidates about teaching and learning are appeared in the positive level regardless of their gender and class.Finally, the teacher candidates responded to the items of dimensions ?Alternative Cognitive Skills? and ?Expectancies About Teaching-Learning? positively, but they responded to the items of the dimension ?Social Cultural Attributes? negatively.Teacher candidates in Turkey show ?New Millennium Learner? characteristics generally but they didn?t accept the social cultural values of ?New Millennium Learner? concept yet.Distribution of the ?New Millennium Learner? characteristics of the teacher candidates according to the variables appeared in a heterogeneous structure.