CORRELATION BETWEEN SOCIAL STUDIES TEACHER CANDIDATES’ EPISTEMOLOGICAL BELIEFS AND THEIR INFORMATION LITERACY LEVELS

Abstract

It is evident that the school is the fundamental institution where both information literacy and sophisticated and flexible epistemological beliefs can be acquired as a competence subject. In this context, the main problem this study aims to address is the vital importance of educating pre-service teachers as information literates with sophisticated and flexible epistemological belief levels for teacher training institutions. Thus, this study aims to determine the epistemological belief and information literacy levels of Social Studies teacher candidates and to investigate whether there is a significant relationship between both levels. Conducted in a relational survey model, the study focuses on the effects of gender and class variables. Participants were 426 social studies teacher candidates studying at four different state universities located in the provinces of Bursa, Istanbul and Çanakkale in the academic year of 2018-2019. During the data collection process, we used the Epistemological Beliefs Scale originally developed by Schommer (1990), and the Information Literacy Scale developed by Adıgüzel (2011). The Epistemological Beliefs Scale utilised in our study was the Turkish version of the scale adapted into Turkish by Deryakulu & Büyüköztürk (2002) and whose validity and reliability analyses were made by Aydın et al. (2017). Apart from these two scales, the participants were also provided with a Personal Information Form to be filled in. Various statistical analyses and tests were applied to the collected data and the following basic findings were obtained: The epistemological beliefs and information literacy skills of social studies teacher candidates are at a high level. There was a low and moderate correlation between the epistemological beliefs of teacher candidates and their information literacy levels in the dimension of "belief that learning depends on effort" and "belief that learning depends on talent,” and a low correlation in the dimension of "belief that there is only one truth.”