Science and Technology Teacher Candidates' Problem Solving Skills [Fen ve teknoloji ö?retmen adaylari{dotless}ni{dotless}n problem çözme becerileri]

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to determine the problem solving skills of science and technology teacher candidates and to examine if their problem solving skills change with respect to various variables such as gender, education type, grade level, the reason of the choosing of his/her department, graduation of high school type, education level of parents, or not. Research data was obtained from 327 science and technology teacher candidates within different grade levels attending to Science Education department in the Faculty of Education at the Amasya University at the end of the spring term of 2009-2010 academic year. In the study, the Problem Solving Inventory was used as the data collection tool. In order to analysis of the data, mean scores, standard deviation, t-test and variance analyze were utilized. At the end of the data analysis, it was determined that there was a significant difference on impatient approach, while there was no significant difference on totally problem solving skills between boys and girls. When teacher candidates' problem solving skills compared with respect to grade level and the reason of the choosing of his/her department, it was observed that there was meaningful differences on problem solving skills means. However, no meaningful differences were obtained on teacher candidates' problem solving skills with respect to graduation of high school type, education level of parents.