Pre-service Teachers’ Opinions about the Use of 21st Century Learner and 21st Century Teacher Skills

Canses Tican,Sabahattin Deniz

doi:10.12973/eu-jer.8.1.181

Abstract

<p style="text-align:justify">The purpose of the current study is to determine pre-service teachers’ opinions about 21st century learner and teacher skills. The study group of the current research is comprised of 391 senior students from an education faculty. As the data collection tool, the 21st century Learner Skills Use Questionnaire and 21st Century Teacher Skills Use Questionnaire were employed. In the analysis of the collected data, frequencies, percentages, arithmetic means, independent samples t-Test, One-Way Anova, Correlation, Mann Whitney-U, Kruskal Wallis techniques were used. The findings of the study revealed that the pre-service teachers’ opinions about 21st century learner and teacher skills vary significantly depending on the variables of gender, department attended, academic achievement, experience of private tutoring and practicum teaching (doing practicum teaching at elementary and secondary schools). As a result, it was concluded that the pre-service teachers are ready for using 21st century learner skills (cognitive skills, autonomous skills, collaboration and flexibility skills, innovativeness skills) and teacher skills (administrative skills, technopedagogical skills, affirmative skills, flexible teaching skills, generative skills). However, it was also found that the pre-service teachers were not able to make enough use of learner and teacher skills during their practicum teaching at schools. Moreover, a positive, medium and significant correlation was found between 21st century learner skills and 21st century teacher skills.</p>

Highlights

The skills needed by people in the 21st century in terms of professional life, citizenship and self-actualization are highly different from the ones needed in the 20th century
The pre-service teachers’ use of 21st century learner skills and 21st century teacher skills vary significantly depending on the variables of gender, department, experience of private tutoring, use of learner skills during practicum teaching and use of teacher skills during practicum teaching
When the pre-service teachers’ use of 21st century learner skills was investigated on the basis of the gender variable, it was found that the female pre-service teachers’ “collaboration and flexibility skills” are better than that of the male preservice teachers. This finding may indicate that female pre-service teachers are more prone to working in teams and pay greater attention to collaboration than male pre-service teachers

Summary

Introduction

The skills needed by people in the 21st century in terms of professional life, citizenship and self-actualization are highly different from the ones needed in the 20th century. Adaptation of people having spent much of their life in the 20th century to the 21st century can be challenging as the skills of the 20th century are different from those of the 21st century and new information and communication technologies have emerged in the 21st century. Globalization, technology, migration, international competition, changing markets and international environmental and political changes add a new urgency to the acquisition of the skills and knowledge needed by students to be successful in the 21st century (Saavedra and Opfer, 2012a). Howard Gardner states that children should be equipped with the knowledge and skills to do the works that cannot be done by machines. This clearly indicates the importance of 21st century skills. Critical thinking, problem solving and cooperation will constitute some kind of “universal literacy” needed to survive in the 21st century (Akgunduz et al, 2015)

Objectives

Methods

Findings

Conclusion