Investigation of the visual literacy skills of visual arts teacher candidates

Visual literacy is a skill that modern human need to learn. Unwittingly, we encounter signs that needs to be visually literate at a certain rate during the day. In the traffic instructions, bus signs, mobile phones, computers and in fact all packaged products such as fast food or coffee that we drink outside, all require visual literacy. We can solve some of these with our basic visual literacy skills. Visual literacy skills have become a necessity for many basic needs such as location information, recall rules, security, choosing the right product. When we understand that visual literacy is so intertwined with life, we realize how much this skill is necessary and how much it can make our lives easier, especially these days that we are surrounded by technology. While this skill is so important for everyone, whether in the field of education or profession, it is of particular importance for visual arts teacher candidates. Visual literacy is a skill that has to be taught in a certain order and programmatically. In our country, students knowledge about visual literacy is limited with methods and information from lessons that teach the basic principles and elements of art/design and lessons aimed at supporting critical thinking skills. For this reason, departments in the field of visual arts should support the visual literacy skills of students with a course that planned in it self to provide visual literacy skills In this thesis, it is aimed to examine the level of the contributions of the lessons in the undergraduate program of Fine Art Education to the visual literacy skills. For this reason, the Visual Literacy Index developed by Maria Avgerinou was applied to an easily accessible sample group which is the students in grades 1 and 4 and obtained data use for the examine and compare of visual literacy skills of the two groups. To prevent every problem that may arise from the fact that the index is comprehensive and contains questions in different styles, this research applied at one university's fine arts education department. The multi-session measuring tool aims to measure the intellectual and visual competence of the student in the field of visual literacy. According to this study, visual literacy levels of the two groups were found to be close to each other.