Examination of teacher's opinions on knowledge pollution in academic studies and strategies to collect with information pollution

The purpose of this research is to examine the views of pre-service teachers on information pollution in their academic studies and strategies to cope with information pollution in terms of gender, grade level, department and having prior knowledge about the concepts of information pollution. The survey model, which is one of the quantitative research methods, was used in the research. 1188 teacher candidates studying in different departments of Çukurova University Faculty of Education in Adana participated in the research. An online questionnaire developed by the researcher was used as a data collection tool in the research. After the survey was developed, the survey items were transferred to the Google Forms online environment and all conditions were met for the participants to answer the survey online. In the study, frequency and percentage distributions were calculated for the data obtained from the questionnaire and the data were analyzed with the Mann Whitney U test and the Kruskal-Wallis test. As a result of the research, it was determined that pre-service teachers were aware of the information pollution caused by the quality of the information, they did not have enough information about the information pollution caused by the behaviors of the people who included the types of false information, which is a new development, and their competence in dealing with the information pollution should be increased. It was determined that the views of teacher candidates on information pollution in their academic studies differed significantly according to gender, class, department and prior knowledge variables. According to this, it was concluded that male teacher candidates had higher item averages than female teacher candidates in their views on information pollution caused by the quality of knowledge and the behaviors of people, and fourth-grade pre-service teachers had higher item averages than other teacher candidates. In addition, it was concluded that the pre-knowledge levels of the teacher candidates were deficient. Regarding the ways of coping with information pollution, it was concluded that female teacher candidates had a higher item average than male teacher candidates, and third grade teacher candidates had a higher item average than other classroom teacher candidates. It was concluded that the pre-knowledge levels of the pre-service teachers were high in their views on ways to cope with information pollution. Keywords: Information pollution, information quality, strategies to cope with information pollution, types of misinformation