An analysis of social, literary and technological sources used by classroom teachers in social studies courses

Abstract

In this study, social, literary and technological sources used by classroom teachers in social studies courses are analyzed in terms of frequency. The study employs mixed methods research and is designed following the convergent parallel design. In the qualitative part of the study, phenomenological method was used and in the quantitative dimension, scanning model was used. The participants of the study were 305 classroom teachers who work at public schools in Turkey. Qualitative data were collected from nine classroom teachers. The data of the study were collected using the following two tools: “scale for social, literary and technological sources used in social studies courses” and interview form with six open items. The use of the social, literary and technological sources in social studies courses was found in terms of arithmetical mean and standard deviation. In order to see whether or not the data had a normal distribution, the Shapiro-Wilk tests were employed. It was found that the data did not have a normal distribution. Therefore, the Mann Whitney U and Kruskal Wallis-H Tests were used to analyze the data. Content analysis was also used in examining the data. The findings showed that the participants mostly used media, technological sources and literary work in the courses. Outside school and source people were found to be less used by the participants. Key words: Social studies, classroom teacher, social, cultural and technological sources, mixed methods, exploratory factor analysis.