Abstract:

In order to find a place in high schools which take position upper in the league table or to enter at well known universities students need to get high scores from the national examinations organized by the state in Turkey. In these exams difficulty level of questions is arranged as high so as to be distinctive in nature. An example of such questions can be those “what is the best answer below?”. In this kind of questions, which ask “the most, the least, the effective, much more”, nearly all choices are correct, but one is more correct than the others. In other word, it is the best explanatory choice as compared to the other choices. Thus, students are required to choice the best fits or the most correct alternative among already suitable or correct ones. There are cases where the correct answer announced by the government does not the “most, better” alternative. Therefore the present study aims to investigate the ratio of such questions in national exams and the social studies prospective teachers’ opinions about such questions. Case study design among qualitative research tradition was adopted in this research. Questionnaire composed of open ended questions, which ask the prospective teachers’ opinions about type, nature and efficiency of “the most...” questions, formed the main data collection tool. The central examinations of SBS/OKS and YGS/ÖSS conducted for last 15 years were examined so as to find out the ratio/percentage of such questions asked. Then, twelve questions among those which require the most correct answer were selected. They were compiled as a test and distributed to the social studies prospective teachers (n= 70) to answer. At completion of answering the questions, the prospective teachers’ answers to and ideas about the nature of questions were obtained. The prospective teachers’ open ended responses were analyzed via content analyses method. The results of the analysis indicated that “the most correct” questions formed 4-12 % of the questions asked in the national exams. Findings of the study showed that the prospective teachers had difficulty in finding the correct answer to such questions.

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