Investigating the Prospective Teachers’ Beliefs About Learning

Abstract

The purpose of this research is to examine the learning-related beliefs of prospective teachers who continue their education at university. Within this overall purpose of the study the following questions were tried to be answered: 1) what level is the prospective teachers’ beliefs about traditional and constructivist (cognitive, social and radical) learning? 2) Do the traditional and constructivist beliefs of prospective teachers differentiate significantly according to their gender, class and branches? This study was conducted in survey model with 293 female and 174 male, a total of 467 prospective teachers at Dicle University in the academic year of 2014-2015. As data collection tool “Belief Scale towards Learning” developed by Bay et al. (2012) was used. As the results of the study, it was found that the prospective teachers had adopted more constructivist beliefs than traditional beliefs; there is no statistically significant difference between the beliefs of the prospective teachers about learning according to their gender; there is a significant difference according to their branch; it has been determined a significant difference between the beliefs about traditional, constructivist, radical and social constructivist learning according to the class variable. However, there was no significant difference between the prospective teachers’ cognitive learning beliefs according to class variables. Keywords: Beliefs, prospective teachers, learning