The attitudes of prospective science teachers` towards creative drama and their views about story work

In this study it was aimed i) to determine the attitudes of prospective scienceteacher towards creative drama method ii) to diagnose whether these attitudes changein terms of gender or not iii) to find out prospective science teachers? ideas about theuse of story work, a technique in the creative drama, in science education.This study consists of two steps. In the first step, the creative drama attitudescale was applied to prospective science teachers, who did not take any coursesrelated to drama to determine their attitudes towards creative drama method. It wasgiven as a pretest and post test to the sample. The sample of the study consist of 66prospective science teachers (34 Female and 32 male) who were studying in thefourth class of Science Education Department of Abant zzet Baysal University inBolu. This study lasted 14 weeks in spring semester during 2004-2005 teachingsession.In the second step, the course named special topics in science II was taught byusing the story work that is a technique in creative drama. It lasted 5 weeks. At theend of the course six students were interviewed by using a interview protocol thathas structured questions to reveal prospective science teachers? ideas about usingstory works in science. These six students were chosen according to their points ofthe creative drama attitude scale.A Statistical Package programme called SPSS was used to analyze thequantitave data. For the interview, the content analysis was made and frequencydistribution were prepared.The results showed that i) the difference between pre test scores and post testscores of creative drama attitude scale was statistically significant ii) genderdifference appeared in pre test, in general, however it disappeared in the post testscores. In addition, in the light of interview results the following remarks can begiven: with the creative drama method and specifically the story technique, thelearning is meaningful and enjoyable, there is more room to develop creativity aswell as hands on minds on activities, it is more effective regarding to understand theabstract concepts in science, it is helpful not only in the classroom also in the lifeafter university. Some important suggestions were proposed related to results of thisstudy as well as future studies that can be made in the light of results of this study.Keywords : Creative Drama, Attitude, Story Work, Prospective Science Teacher