Abstract:

The basic of the current research was to conduct the Turkish langauge adaptation, reliability and validity analyses of the Epistemological Belief Scale Towards Learning (EBSTL) that had been developed by Sing-Chai, Teo, and Beng-Lee (2009). In addition, the participatory prospective teachers’ (PTs) epistemological beliefs about learning were also explored in terms of gender, academic attainment, age, grade level and academic program type variables. The current research was conducted by the participation of 395 prospective teachers who were enrolled in İstanbul Aydın University’s Faculty of Education. Exploratory factor analysis demonstrated that EBSTL, incorporating 23 items, were composed by four sub-factors labelled as attaining the knowledge, nurture vs. nature, absolute and single reality and epistemic confliction. The established model was found out as acknowledgeable in terms of goodness-of-fit indices that were extracted by virtue of the confirmatory factor analysis. Mann Whitney-U and Kruskal Wallis-H tests for variance analyses confirmed the fact that the PTs epistemological beliefs about learning were significantly differed for the gender variable; however, no significant differences were revealed for the grade level and academic program types. Multiple regression analysis’ results also showed that there was a positive and lower relation among the variables as epistemological beliefs about learning, ages and academic attainments of the PTs.

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