Özet:

With the COVID-19 pandemic that emerged in 2019, educational activities started to be conducted online at all education levels all around the world as well as in our country. Although distance education has offered the chance to prevent learning losses and to continue education, the fact that students of all ages are away from their friends and stay in front of a screen for a long time has resulted in some problems. Moreover, internet addiction and the use of the internet for other purposes outside the classroom, that is cyberloafing, are among the negative effects of the internet use in educational settings. Cyberloafing is defined as students’ tendency or behaviour to use the internet for purposes that are not related to the course during class hours. Stemming from the widespread use of the internet especially in mobile phones, cyberloafing behaviours have often been encountered during the lessons held in face-to-face education, and many studies have been conducted on this issue in recent years. The reason for the need to know how the cyberloafing behaviours develop is the fact that the majority of the courses have been taught via distance education since the beginning of the pandemic. This study, therefore, aimed to determine the prospective teachers’ cyberloafing behaviours during online lessons and their reasons. For this purpose, the “Cyberloafing Behaviour Scale” developed by Akbulut, Dursun, Dönmez, and Şahin (2016) in addition to an information form prepared by the researcher and consisting of open-ended questions to explore the causes of cyberloafing. The research was conducted as a survey, involving 187 students of different genders, achievement statuses and grade levels, studying at the Faculty of Islamic Sciences, which trains Religious Culture and Ethics teachers in a state university in the 2020/21 academic year, when the courses were taught via distance education. Prior to the survey, necessary permissions were obtained from the academics who developed the “Cyberloafing Scale” and the ethics committee of the university where the survey would be conducted. The preliminary study of the survey was carried out with 10 students and necessary corrections were made in the open-ended questions according to the feedback received. Due to the pandemic conditions, the questionnaires were administered to the students electronically. Data were obtained from 200 students, but at the end of the eliminations, 13 students who did not answer some questions were excluded, and 187 students were involved as participants. The data collected were uploaded to the SPSS Statistics 25 in order to perform statistical analyses. The content analysis method was used for analysing the data obtained from the responses to the open-ended questions asked to identify the causes of cyberloafing. The codes and categories were created comparatively with a field expert researcher as a result of the content analysis. In order to ensure the validity of the research, the collected data were reported in detail and the way the results were reached was explained in all stages. In addition, the results were compared with the results of previous similar studies on this subject. The results of this study showed that the total mean scores of the prospective teachers from the “Cyberloafing Scale” were at a ‘very low’ level. The analysis of the mean scores of the sub-dimensions of the “Cyberloafing Scale” indicated that the scores for the sub-dimension of ‘Sharing’ was ‘Low’, whereas the sub-dimensions of ‘Real-time updating’, ‘Accessing online content’, ‘Shopping’, and ‘Gaming/Gambling’ were found ‘Very low’, respectively. In conclusion, no significant difference was found in the cyberloafing-related total scores of the prospective teachers in terms of gender, grade point average, type of high school, and grade level variables. The student responses given to the open-ended questions were evaluated through content analysis, upon which the reasons for cyberloafing were grouped under four categories such as the reasons emanated from students, instructors, distance education application, and other external factors. Depending on data, cyberloafing behaviours originated by students were found to depend on such reasons as boredom, curiosity, disliking the lesson, lack of motivation, desire to have fun, internet addiction, and believing that they can do two things at the same time. It has also been concluded that the reasons such as the students’ inability to achieve efficient learning during the lesson, the teachers’ teaching methods and inability of actively involving the students in the lesson cause the students to feel bored of the lesson and turn to the extracurricular internet environments.

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