Assessing social studies preservice teachers? self-efficacy towards teaching thinking skills

Aim of this thesis is to examine the self-efficacy levels with various parameters on teaching thinking skills of universities, education faculties, and fourth class students of social studies education discipline (preservice teachers).In this descriptive research, for the reliability of the scale, the pilot research was carried out with 77 fourth class students (preservice teachers) in Niğde University Education Faculty, Social Studies Education Discipline. The working group of the research consists of 312 fourth class social studies students (preservice teachers) from the education faculties of Ankara University, Gazi University, Selçuk University. In the preparation of the working group, purposive sampling method was used from the randomized sampling methods.Some of the findings and conclusions which were gained in the research are:It has been realized that, the social studies preservice teachers consider themselves considerably sufficient according to the answers to questions like; creating a class environment available for thinking (Factor-1), teaching higher order thinking skills (Factor-2), teaching transfer (Factor-3) and to notice how students think (Factor-4).It has been realized that the level of self efficacy of social studies preservice teachers on teaching thinking skills varies according to their average academic achievements. This difference is between the self-efficacy levels of teaching thinking skills of the preservice teachers whose academic achievement degree is 2.01-2.50 and the preservice teachers whose academic achievement degree is 3.51-4.00. This difference between these two groups is in favor of the preservice teachers whose academic achievement degree is 3.51-4.00.