Investigation of educational beliefs and motivations of classroom teachers in terms of various variables

This research was done for the purpose of analyzing the differences between educational beliefs and motivations of class teachers. In this study, which was carried out in the general screening and descriptive research model, the education beliefs and motivations of the classroom teachers constituted the dependent variables. Gender, education level, length of service, class taught, school location, school type and branch of which effects were investigated on the educational beliefs and motivations of classroom teachers were used as independent variables in the researching. A total of 555 people, including 536 classroom and 19 branch teachers who are working in different regions of Turkey, participated by answering the questionnaires. In the research, the "Education Beliefs Scale" developed by Yılmaz, Altınkurt and Çokluk (2011) was used to determine the educational beliefs of teachers, and the "Primary School Teacher Motivation Scale" developed by Öztürk and Uzunkol (2013) to determine their motivation. IBM SPSS v.21 package program was used in the analysis of the data obtained from the research. Whether the data obtained from the study was of normal distribution or not was examined by the Shapiro Wilk test. Kruskal Wallis test was used when the data of more than two independent groups wasn't suitable for normal distribution, and Man Whitney U test was used when there were two independent groups. According to the findings obtained from the research, the educational beliefs of the teachers participating in the research, gender, length of service, the teaching of class and the location of the school differed greatly. The motivations of the class teachers participating in the research, gender, education level, length of service and type of school differed greatly. When the relationship between classroom teachers educational beliefs and motivations is examined, it's determined that the dimensions of essentialism, progressivism and reconstructionism, which are educational beliefs sub-dimensions, affect primary school teachers motivation positively, while perennialism and existentialism dimensions do not have a statistically significant effect on primary school teacher motivation. It has been concluded that positive attitude towards the profession and professional success and avoidance dimensions of teacher motivation sub-dimensions positively affect educational beliefs while the dimensions of appreciation and professional happiness and the dimension of assimilation to the profession do not have a statistically important effect on educational beliefs Keywords:Classroom teacher, education belief, motivation