An action research on identifying and overcoming the misconceptions of primary school student teachers' on human rights and democratic citizenship education

This study aims to determine the misconceptions that may occur in the learning processes of candidate primary school teachers about Human Rights and Democratic Citizenship Education (HRDCE), to prepare practices/activities to eliminate these misunderstandings and to try to eliminate potential misconceptions by applying these activities. Action research, one of the qualitative research methods, was used in the study. The study group of the research consists of 31 primary school student teachers who volunteered to participate in the research by filling out the voluntary participation form among 40 pre-service teachers taking the HRDCE course in the fall semester of the 2022- 2023 academic year in the Department of Classroom Teaching at Anadolu University Faculty of Education based on volunteerism. Criterion sampling, one of the purposeful sampling methods, was used to determine the participant group. The criteria were that the participants were undergraduate students of classroom teaching, that they would take the HRDCE course in the fall semester of 2022-2023, and that they were students of Anadolu University. Data were collected through concept definition forms, student diaries, focus group interviews, and activity sheets. The collected data were analyzed by content analysis. The numerical data generated from the concept definition form were analyzed with the paired samples t-test and Wilcoxon signed ranks test in the SPSS program. According to the results of the findings of the research, it was seen that most of the participants had misconceptions about the 30 basic concepts covered in the application, that the activities applied eliminated the misconceptions in the majority of the activities, improved the learning and teaching process, and that the participants expressed positive opinions that they found the application efficient.