Investigation of pre-service science teachers' self efficacy and beliefs towards technology integration

With the use of technology in educational environments, it is seen that there is an increase in students' interest and motivation towards the course and therefore the use of technology in educational environments has science become widespread. In this context, educating teachers who can integrate technology into their courses has become one of the most important goals of teacher training institutions. In this study, it is aimed to provide pre-service teachers to recognize various instructional technologies and to form their own lesson plans by using these technologies. For this purpose, programs termed as Vyond, Kahoot!, Toondoo, Explee, EclipseCrossword have been introduced to pre-service teachers by means of a education program. In this study, the pre-service teachers' beliefs, self-efficacy levels and opinions about technology integration were examined. In this context, the embedded design been a kind of the mixed method research design that includes both quantitative and qualitative research techniques is used. The quantitative part of the study was based on experimental design, and the qualitative part was designed according to case study. In order to examine the beliefs of pre-service teachers in quantitative part of the study, a scale termed as "Technology Applications Scale Part 1" that was developed by Wozney, Venkatesh and Abrami (2006) and adapted into Turkish by Uluay, Nibat and Arıkan (in press) was used. In addition to this, termed as "Self-Efficacy Beliefs for Science Teaching - Form B" that was adapted into Turkish by Tekkaya, Çakıroğlu and Özkan (2004) was used to investigate self-efficacy levels. The semi-structured interview form was used for collecting qualitative data. In the analysis of the quantitative data, Mann Whitney U-test was used. When the findings were examined, it was seen that the self-efficacy and beliefs of the pre-service teachers in the experimental group developed with a statistically significant difference compared to the control group. Also, it was concluded that the pre-service teachers who have negative belief in the use of technology in their courses have a positive change in their opinions at the end of the process.