Preservice science teachers' and preservice primary school teachers' level of science and technology literacy

ABSTRACT PRESERVICE SCIENCE TEACHERS? AND PRESERVICE PRIMARY SCHOOL TEACHERS? LEVEL OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY LITERACY YETİŞİR, Mehmet İkbal Doktoral Thesis, Primary School Teaching Adviser: Fitnat KAPTAN July ? 2007 This paper, tries to analyze the level of science and technology literacy, of pre-service teachers of primary school teaching and science teaching programme. For that reason, this study examines whether the pre-service teachers? level of science and technology literacy differs in respect of some demographic features and whether they tend to present a meaningful linear relation to attitude points linked to science field. `Test of Basic Scientific Literacy? (TBSL) scale was used to investigate the pre-service teachers? level of TBSL, the scale was adapted to Turkish by taking experts? view into account. The pre-service teachers? attitude toward science was investigated by ?Attitude Toward Science Scale? which consists of 11 items. In the pilot-application, which was done for validity of TBSL scale, the scale was applied to 415 students. All findings obtained from these pre-service teachers were totally encoded as true (1) and false (0). KR20 reliability coefficient was calculated for Nature of Science, Science Content and Science-Technology- Society which are subtest of TBSL and TBSL. 209 pre-service teachers from Faculty of Education at Hacettepe University, and 241 pre-service teachers form Faculty of Education at Gazi University, were viii included in this study. Hence the data were collected from 450 pre-service teachers. Pearson correlation, independent sample t-test and one-way ANOVA statistical methods were used to analyze all data. The results of this study indicate that the pre-service teachers? level of TBSL doesn?t show any difference in respect of some demographic variables. Generally, it was found that there was a meaningful relationship between all pre-service teachers? level of TBSL and attitudes towards science field. However, a meaningful relationship between the OSYS points and the level of TBSL was only found out for pre-service science teachers.