Abstract:

Epistemological beliefs are central to beliefs about learning and teaching. Considering that epistemological beliefs will affect pre-service teachers' teaching approaches, we examined preservice teachers' epistemological beliefs in this study. This study used a cross-sectional survey design. The participants were selected via a simple random sampling method among the 3rd, and 4th-grade preservice teachers enrolled in two different universities. Data obtained from 714 preservice teachers were included in the data analysis. The "Scientific Epistemological Belief Scale" developed by Conley, Pintrich, Vekiri, and Harrison (2004) and adapted into Turkish by many researchers was used to identify preservice teachers' epistemological beliefs. The data were analyzed using the SPSS program. Results showed that preservice teachers had naive epistemological beliefs about the certainty and source of knowledge and sophisticated beliefs about the justification of knowledge and the development of knowledge. In addition, preservice teachers' epistemological beliefs about the certainty and source of knowledge significantly differed in favor of males. The epistemological beliefs of preservice science teachers are more sophisticated than preservice preschool teachers. Besides, preservice teachers' epistemological beliefs did not differ significantly regarding grade level.

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