Examination of preschool teachers' attitudes and views towards socio-scientific issues

This research was carried out to find prospective preschool teachers' attitudes and views regarding socioscientific issues. In the research, explanatory sequential design was preferred among the mixed method approaches in which qualitative and quantitative methods are used together. The quantitative data were collected with the "Attitudes towards Socioscientific Issues Scale" developed by Topçu (2010) and the qualitative data were collected a "Teacher Interview Form towards Socioscientific Issues". SPSS version 26 was used in the analysis of the quantitative data, and content analysis was used in the analysis of the qualitative data. As a result of the analysis, a number of variables such as gender, professional experience, education status, using social media were found to be determinants and it has been observed that teachers generally have positive attitudes towards socioscientific issues. In addition to the fact that teachers feel competent about socioscientific issues, it has been determined that they have the most information about environmental pollution, child abuse and air pollution among socioscientific issues, and they are interested in alternative medicine, child abuse and genetic copying. It was concluded that teachers included environmental pollution, air pollution and child abuse in the education and did not include some socio-scientific issues such as abortion, nuclear energy, genetic copying, on the grounds that they were not suitable for the developmental characteristics of the preschool period. Suggestions were given as a result of the results obtained regarding the attitudes and opinions of the teachers involved in the research KEYWORDS: Socioscientific Issues, Pre-school teacher, Attitude, View, mixed-method, semi-structured interview