Opinions and Attitudes of Education Faculty Students towards Research Methods in Education Course

Abstract

Research is the whole of the systematic efforts of individuals by making new discoveries and inventions to find solutions to the problems they face or to improve the current situation. After the implementation of teacher training activities by higher education institutions, courses such as "Research Techniques", "Research Methods in Education" and "Research Methods" are included in the curriculum of higher education institutions to provide students with research competencies. It is important for prospective teachers to have positive attitudes towards this course for them to acquire the knowledge and skills in question effectively. In this direction, in this study, it was tried to determine the attitudes and opinions of teacher candidates towards the Research Course in Education. In this research, in which the attitudes and opinions of Bayburt University Faculty of Education students towards the RME course are tried to be determined, mixed method and explanatory sequential design was used. In the study, a single survey model was used to determine the attitudes of students towards the RME course, a relational survey model was used to examine the sub-dimensions of attitudes according to the departments and classes of the students, and focus group interview was used to determine their views about the course.The Kruskal Wallis H test was used to determine whether the attitudes of the groups showed an independent evaluation from each other. In the research, an attitude scale developed by the researcher was used as a data collection tool to determine the attitudes of the students towards the RME course, and a focus group interview form was used to determine their opinions. The quantitative sample of the study consists of 190 university students selected through purposive sampling, and the qualitative sample consists of 10 candidate teachers selected from this group with the same method. When the research findings were examined, it was seen that the attitudes of the novice teachers towards the RME course differed significantly in favor of men according to the self-confidence variable in the sub-dimensions of the attitude scale. It is thought that including the RME course, which is among the elective courses in Education faculties, among the compulsory courses, extending the one-semester and 3-credit RME course in terms of credit.