Science Teacher Education in Turkey

Science Teacher Education in Turkey

In Turkey, PSTs ( preservice science teachers’) are placed in undergraduate teacher education programmes through a nationwide university entrance examination after graduating from high schools. Students must submit a list of programmes that they would like to study in their order of preference after taking the examination. Students’ grade point aver- ages in high school are also important to be accepted by science teacher education programmes. Most of the candidates for science teacher education programmes come from science programmes in Turkish high schools. These students take more science courses and more advanced science courses at the high school level than other students.

There are currently 37 universities that have middle school science teacher preparation programs in Turkey. Specifically, the middle school science teacher education program is a four-year program (eight semesters) in all education faculties after the government established the Turkish Higher Educational Council in 1981. The PSTs’ sole responsibility is to teach science to their students from Grades 6 to 8 after graduating from the faculty. In this program the PSTs needed to complete 154 credits of course work distributed in six areas: general science and laboratory courses; more specific science courses, such as analytical chemistry; mathematics courses; general culture and language courses; general education courses, such as Educational Psychology; and science methods courses (Turkish Higher Educational Council, 2006).

Currently, most faculty members teaching PSTs in the science teacher education programs have backgrounds and research interests in science such as analytic chemistry and solid-state physics rather than science education because science education is a very new academic field in Turkish higher education. Many Turkish graduate students have been supported by the Turkish Higher Educational Council and the Turkish Ministry of National Education for completing masters and PhD theses in science education in universities in the UK and the USA for the past 7–10 years. As in any other developing country, because of the lack of financial resources and a huge number of teacher candidates, ‘chalk and talk’ is the dominant teaching method in the programs.