Abstract:

   This study aims to determine the changes in achievement, attitudes and opinions of prospective teachers, created by an Introduction to Educational Sciences Course using UbD (Understanding by Design). The research has a pretest-posttest semi-experimental design with experimental and control groups. The study group consists of a total of 66 prospective teachers attending first class at Faculty of Education. Participants were given the course achievement test developed by researchers and the Attitude Scale for the Course on Introduction to Education Sciences developed by Önen and Koçak (2011) and SPSS 21.0 was used in order to analyze the data. In the collection of qualitative data, the student reflection papers were used and content analysis was performed in order to analyze the data. The findings indicated that in the subscales of Sympathy for the Course and Importance, prospective teachers’ attitudes significantly differ in favor of experimental group. In addition, the experimental group’s attitude scores in the subscale of the Antipathy has significantly decreased. However, a statistically significant difference between experimental and control groups was not found in terms of the analysis of course academic achievement tests. Prospective teachers’ opinions revealed that Introduction to Educational Sciences Course using UbD activates the positive affective features of students and increase active participation in the course.

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