Investigation of Pre-service Social Studies Teachers’ Self-Efficacy Perception of and Attitudes Towards the Profession of Teaching

Abstract

The current study aimed to investigate pre-service social studies teachers’ self-efficacy perception of their ability to teach geography and attitudes towards the profession of teaching in relation to the variables of gender and university attended. The study is a descriptive study employing the survey model. The research sample was determined from the universities, where there were two public universities represented from each of the seven geographical regions, and a fourth-year student of social studies teaching in the spring semester of the 2017-2018 academic year. The study was carried out with the participation of 654 pre-service social studies teachers from 14 different universities across Turkey. In order to collect data, “The Geography Teaching Self-Efficacy Scale” and “The Scale of Attitudes towards the Profession of Teaching” were used. In the analysis of the collected data, arithmetic mean, standard deviation, independent samples t-test and one-way variance analysis (ANOVA) were used. According to the findings of the current study, self-efficacy perceptions related to geography teaching and their attitudes towards the profession are high. The mean scores taken from the whole self-efficacy perception scale and its sub-dimensions were found to be not varying significantly depending on the gender variable while they were found to be varying significantly depending on the variable of the university attended. On the other hand, the attitudes towards the profession of teaching were found to be varying significantly depending on both of the variables.