Pre-Service Teachers' Attitudes Towards Lab Applications in Science Teaching

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to investigate: (1) in-service science teachers’ and elementary students’ attitudes towards laboratory activities in science teaching; (2) teachers’ self-evaluations of their science teaching strategies. Our research questions follow “What do in -service science teachers and students believe in science education lab experiments in elementary school settings? What are science teaching approaches and techniques utilized by the teachers? How do students and teachers’ attitudes towards science correlate with each other?” In order to fulfill above research questions, 196 pre-service science teachers were randomly selected in two separate universities school in Central and West of Turkey. Participants were enrolled in 2-4. years in their teacher preparation programs during the study. Data collection process took place in the first semester of 2015. Data were collected via the questionnaire “Students Attitude Survey towards Laboratory Activities to explore attitudes of teachers towards laboratory applications in science. Findings of the study showed that teachers believe that they are insecure in science laboratory and applications but they think that they have necessary teaching skills to teach science. Other results indicate that teachers are very fond of learning science in laboratory and it makes the concepts more reasonable. They also think that doing experiment in lab is fun.