Examining cyberbullying awareness levels of university students and their coping strategies: Example of Buca Faculty of Education

The aim of this study is to determine pre-service teachers cyberbullying awareness levels and their knowledge of strategies for dealing with cyberbullying. Cyberbullying awareness levels and knowledge of strategies for coping with cyberbullying were discussed in terms of various demographic variables. The study group of the research; In the 2019-2020 academic year, there are 471 teacher candidates, 324 of whom are female and 147 are male, studyingin 4th grade at Dokuz Eylul University Buca Education Faculty in Izmir province. This study is a quantitative study in which the survey model, one of the descriptive methods, is used to determine the cyberbullying awareness of pre-service teachers and their coping strategies. The "Virtual Bullying Awareness Scale for Teachers" developed by Ayas and Horzum (2011) was used to identify the cyberbullying awareness status of prospective teachers.The "Scale to Deal With Virtual Bullying" developed by Koç and others (2016) was used to identify strategies for teacher candidates to deal with cyberbullying.In addition to the scales, the demographic information of the teacher candidates was collected with the "Personal Information" form.The data related to the study were analyzed with SPSS 25.0 program.Two-group variables from the independent variables of the study were analyzed with the Mann-Whitney U test from non-parametric tests because they did not show normal distribution as a result of the normality test.Since variables with three or more groups did not show normal distribution, the data were analyzed using the Kruskal-Wallis H test, one of the non-parametric tests.Since the normality values in the awareness dimension of the number of siblings variable showed normal distribution, the Anova test was applied.At the end of the study, it was determined that the level of cyberbullying awareness of prospective teachers and the level of strategy knowledge for dealing with cyberbullying were moderate. Other findings of the study were discussed and interpreted in the discussion section. Keywords:Teacher, teacher candidate, cyberbullying awareness, dealing with cyberbullying.