First Steps in Teaching Profession... Determining Students' Attitudes Towards The Course on Introduction To Education


Onen A. S., Kocak C.

PAMUKKALE UNIVERSITESI EGITIM FAKULTESI DERGISI-PAMUKKALE UNIVERSITY JOURNAL OF EDUCATION, sa.29, ss.59-72, 2011 (ESCI) identifier

Özet

This study aimed to assess the attitudes of student teachers towards the "Introduction to Education" course, which was previously called "Introduction to Teaching Profession". The participants of the study were 413 student teachers studying at Hacettepe University, Faculty of Education. The process of developing the Attitude Scale for Introduction to Education Sciences involved a literature scan, taking student opinions through essays, creating an item pool, taking expert opinions, a pretesting study as well as studies on determining the structural validity and reliability. Factor analysis results revealed that the Introduction to Education Attitude Scale containing 29 items loaded on three factors. Three factors were interpreted 68,1% of total original variance on scale scores. The first factor, which was called "Sympathy", consisted of eight statements expressing positive attitudes. The second factor involved ten statements focusing on the importance of Introduction to Education Sciences and was named as "Importance". The third factor consisting of eleven statements expressing negative attitudes was named as "Antipathy". The statistical analysis concluded that the Attitude Scale for Introduction to Education Sciences is a valid and reliable tool that could be used for relative purposes in the field of education.