The science process skills of pre-service science teachers? qualitative and quantitative analysis

This study employs qualitative and quantitative research methods to determine, for Pre-Service Science Teacher? science process skill levels, the direct or indirect effects of the following independent variables: grade point average (GPA) and attitudes towards both science teaching and cognitive development. It investigates whether there are statistically significant correlations between the proficiency of pre-service science teacher in science process skills and the independent variables of gender, the students? type of high school education, parental educational backgrounds, and the students? perception of their success in science courses. It also evaluates teacher candidates? views of their own proficiencies in science process skills. The study?s quantitative component?s sample, drawn from fourth year Science Teaching students in Turkish university elementary education departments, consisted of 355 fourth year Science Teaching students attending Gazi, Kafkas, Middle East Technical, Muğla, Atatürk and Erzincan Universities. The research?s qualitative data came from eight pre-service science teacher candidates at Gazi and Middle East Technical Universities. Analyzing the quantitative data showed that science process skill levels are strongly influenced by the students? perception of their success in science courses, moderately influenced by parental educational backgrounds and weakly influenced by both high school type and gender. There is a strong positive correlation between science process skills and attitudes towards science teaching, and these skills are also positively correlated with both cognitive development, and GPA. Attitudes towards science teaching and cognitive development directly predict science process skills, but GPA is not a direct predictor. Meanwhile, the qualitative data indicate that the teacher candidates have good skill levels in the following sub-dimensions of integrated science process skills: formulating and interpreting a hypothesis, determining variables, reading and interpreting graphs, designing an vexperiment, interpreting experiment results, defining operations and recording experiment data. However, they appear to have difficulty defining and determining dependent, independent and control variables.Keywords:Science process skills,cognitive development, science teaching