Özet:

Abstract enWithin the scope of the educational reform of 2004, in the curriculums which are applied starting with the 2005-2006 academic year, cognitive and constructivist approaches have been taken into consideration rather than the behavioral approach. In the curriculum the common skills that determine the vision and target behaviour are specified and one of them is stated as the inquiry skills. As the aim of the curriculums is to raise students as individuals who can question and have critical thinking as well as problem solving skills and are eager to inquire besides establishing student centered learning environments which encourage active student participation. For this purpose, the need for applying inquiry based learning in all lessons, particularly in science and technology lessons, is emphasized. Inquiry based learning is applied in many lessons and through different variables its effectiveness has been studied. However teachers are very important in order to carry out the changes in the curriculum and to have positive results, thus to raise students with increased inquiry skills it is important that teachers, even preservice teachers, have increased inquiry skills. When the researches were examined, a scale for determining the inquiry skills of teachers and preservice teachers was not encountered in the literature. Therefore in this study, an inquiry skills scale was developed for preservice teachers. In the process of developing the scale, the literature was reviewed and an item pool was prepared through evaluating the views of preservice teachers on “inquiry” according to their writings. The item pool was examined by experts and after making the necessary corrections, it was applied to the sample. The sample was formed of 425 seniors in Science, Class and Social Sciences Teaching Departments. According to the factor analyses results, the scale was formed by 14 items and 3 factors which are all named in regard to the theoretical framework. After the explanatory factor analyses, the confirmatory factor analyses were done and scale’s factor structure was confirmed. Results revealed that model is coherent. The confirmatory factor analyses were repeated by spliting the group into two and model’s coherence is supported. The inquiry skills scale is a valid and reliable scale which is comprised of 14 items and 3 factors and it measures preservice teachers’ inquiry skills

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