Pre-service Science and Primary School Teachers' Identification of Scientific Process Skills

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to conduct a comparative analysis of pre-service primary school and science teachers' identification of scientific process skills. The study employed the survey method, and the sample included 95 pre-service science teachers and 95 pre-service primary school teachers from the Faculty of Education at Recep Tayyip Erdogan University in Turkey. All participating students were in their third year. A 24-question Scientific Process Skills Test was employed as the data collection tool. Students were asked to choose the correct answer for each question and specify which scientific process skills were measured with the answer. The analysis of the students' answers involved tabulating the correct answers given for each question and students' answers concerning the scientific process skill measured by the answer along with their frequencies. The analysis indicated that pre-service science teachers gave more correct answers than pre-service primary school teachers in the first section of the study, which made them more successful overall. Considering that the second section of the test included questions about acquisitions, the pre-service teachers, who were from two different departments, provided similar answers, and no significant difference was found. Furthermore, the pre-service teachers from both departments used many skills interchangeably.