Beliefs of social students teachers on effective use of reading skills

This research has been carried out to determine the beliefs of social studies teachers about the effective use of reading skills in social studies teaching. The research is based on a cross-sectional description model. Its population is composed of social studies teachers working in the secondary schools in Çorum province in the 2016-2017 academic year and in the central districts and villages of the central district of Kırşehir in the 2017-2018 academic year. The research did not employ any sample selection method so as to reach 232 social studies teachers who comprise the whole population. However, 164 teachers were available due to the reasons such as not accepting to participate in the research, being absent from school when the research was being conducted and officiating as school director, etc. In order to assess the beliefs of social studies teachers on the active use of reading skills in Social Studies course, the scale titled "the beliefs of branch teachers on using reading skills in their fields of teaching" developed by Yıldırım (2016) was adapted and used. SPSS 25.00 (Stastical Package for Social Sciences) was used to analyze the data. Meanwhile, distributions of frequency (f), percentage (%), arithmetic mean ( ) and standard deviation (SD) were computed. Kolmogorov-Smirnov test was applied to see whether the data distribution is normal or not when comparing multiple variables. In cases that the data did not show a normal distribution, Mann-Whitney U and Kruskal-Wallis H tests were applied to compare two variables and three or more variables, respectively. The results of the research can be summarized as follows: Arithmetic mean of the beliefs of social studies teachers on the effective use of reading skills in social studies course is 5,43. Accordingly, they "apt of agree" to use reading skills actively in Social Studies course. In addition, social studies teachers' beliefs about the effective use of reading skills; gender, the department they graduated, the faculty they graduated from and the province they work in. It was concluded that the belief levels of the social studies teachers regarding the effective use of reading skills differed according to seniority and this difference was in favor of the most senior teachers.