Abstract
INVESTIGATION OF DEMOCRATIC BELIEFS OF TEACHER CANDIDATES ACCORDING TO VARIOUS VARIABLES
The concept of democracy, the meanings attached to it, and the debates about the application of democracy, cover a wide range of historical processes. One of these areas of discussion is education. The democracy of the students and the reflection of it on the school and other living spaces is one of the educationally important issues. While the role of teachers is crucial in helping students to transform democracy into a way of life, it is essential that teachers firstly believe in the training they receive before starting their career. In this context, the aim of studying is determining the democratic belief levels of the prospective teachers and examining the relation of democratic teacher beliefs to various variables. Descriptive scanning models are used in the study. The study group of study constitutes 292 prospective teachers in the Faculty of Education of the University of Kafkas in the spring semester of 2015-2016, who are trained in pre-school teachers, classroom teachers, science teachers, social studies teachers, and psychological counseling and guidance programs with students from first year to fourth grade. The Democratic Teacher Beliefs Scale (DTBS) developed by Shechtman (2002) and adapted to Turkish by Kesici (2006) was used in the research. SPSS 20.0 program was used in the analysis of the research data and independent groups t-test and one way analysis of variance (ANOVA) were used in the analysis of the data. As a result of the research, it was seen that the teacher candidates differed according to the democratic teacher beliefs according to their demographic characteristics, according to the sex, the program and the mother tongue they studied, and there was no significant difference according to age, region and class.
Keywords
Democracy, democratic beliefs, teacher candidates.
