Investigating relationship between science teaching attitudes and cognitive flexibility levels of preschool teachers

Investigation of the Relationship Between Preschool Teachers' Attitudes towards Science Education and Cognitive Flexibility Levels The main purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between pre-school teachers' attitudes towards science education and their cognitive flexibility levels. The second objective is to determine the effect of demographic variables (gender, age, education level, professional seniority, place and type of school they work) on teachers' attitudes towards science education and cognitive flexibility levels. Therefore, we used the relational screening method which one of the descriptive research models. In this context, personal information of 207 pre-school teachers (12 males, 195 females) was collected via the Personal Information Form prepared by the researcher. In addition, two different scales were used to measure teachers' attitudes towards science education and cognitive flexibility levels. These scales are Attitude Scale of Preschool Teachers Against Science Education (Pepele Ünal, Akman and Gelbal, 2010) and Flexibility Scale (Altunkol, 2011). The Kolmogorov-Smirnov and Shapiro-Wilktest tests were used to determine the distribution of the data and Mann-Whitney U and Kruskall Wallis H tests were used in the comparisons between the groups due to the imbalances in the category sizes. According to the findings obtained in the analysis of the data; It was determined that there was a positive and significant relationship between pre-school teachers' attitudes towards science education, sub-dimensions of attitude towards science education (self-development, self-efficacy) and cognitive flexibility levels. In addition, when the demographic variables were examined; there was a significant difference in the self-development sub-dimension for the gender variable, in the self-efficacy sub-dimension for the age variable and in the total attitude towards science education and self-efficacy sub-dimension for the school type variable. There were no significant differences for the variables of education level, professional seniority and school location. Key words: Attitudes towards science education, self-development, self-efficacy, cognitive flexibility, preschool teachers.