Pre-service teachers' attitudes towards scientific research methods course: (The sample of Gazi University, Gazi Faculty of Education)

Abstract


Introduction
Having the competence of conducting research, inquiry and reaching a conclusion has become an important skill required to produce information in today's world.In particular, individuals studying at or having graduated from a university are expected to have the knowledge and skills necessary to conduct research, develop research designs and make analysis.For example, in order to foster problem solving skill, one of the 21st century life skills, firstly curiosity about conducting research needs to be developed.With this curiosity aroused in an individual, the individual can acquire different skills.In addition, schools have a very important mission in the inculcation of this and similar life skills.As stated by Pratschler (2009, p. 10), administrators, teachers and students are expected to have different knowledge and skills.In order to meet the increasing demand for these skills at higher education level, there is a lot of work to be done by education faculties because those who will guide students in their pursuit of these skills are teachers.As teacher training programs aim to impart basic competences in pre-service teachers (Bhargava & Paty, 2010, p. 7), they should be qualified and competent enough to impart particularly new life skills to pre-service teachers.
In various departments of many universities in Turkey, in all the departments of education faculties and in some departments of vocational colleges, there is a course; which is called with different names but mainly with the name "Scientific Research Methods" [SRM], aiming to inculcate equip students with skills needed to conduct research.In this course, students are instructed about many different research-related subjects such as basic concepts related to research methods, basic principles, research process, how to recognize and identify the problem, data collection tools and their properties, data collection, analysis and evaluation of data, interpretation of results, access to databases to find theses and articles, basic paradigms, types of research, qualitative and quantitative research designs, sampling, data collection and analysis in qualitative research, validity and reliability in research, reviewing, evaluating and presenting articles or theses, preparing research reports in accordance with ethical principles, conducting action research in the field of education (Higher Education Council, 2019).It is thought that these subjects will contribute to the acquisition of critical thinking, creativity, knowledge literacy skills as well as problem solving skills which are defined as 21st century life skills.
The importance of the SRM course that pre-service teachers take during their learning process is not only limited to the above-mentioned subjects.Through its content, this course will improve pre-service teachers' perceptions of other courses and will contribute to the acquisition of the qualifications required by the profession of teaching as it will foster the development of research, inquiry and problem-solving skills.In addition, as stated by Yildirim (1999, p. 7), this course can serve other purposes such as teaching how to construct the research design that enables the research to be logical and systematic, to collect data for this purpose, to interpret the collected data, to provide realistic answers to the investigated topic and to reach conclusions.When all these objectives of the course are taken into consideration, it is clear that the SRM course contributes to the development of the skill of conducting systematic and logical research in pre-service teachers.When viewed from this aspect, it is very important that pre-service teachers develop positive attitudes towards this course.As pointed out by Zeichner (1995, p. 153), research is one of the few ways to potentially benefit teacher training programs.In this way, pre-service teachers can develop a positive attitude towards their profession by having the ability to conduct research before they begin their active professional career.As is known, positive professional attitude is very important for the professional development of each employee (Cynthia and Benjamin, 2013, p. 204).In this way, people can become professional in the conduct of their profession and become competent in self-development.Positive attitudes developed towards undergraduate courses within the teaching profession become the determinant of professional skills.Due to the above-mentioned features of the course, pre-service teachers who take the SRM course can become more curious about their courses, question and solve the problems they face, develop solutions, select appropriate data collection tools, collect data, analyze it and reach conclusions.Pre-service teachers can also learn the necessity of carrying out research while planning their lessons, to design the content of their lessons more scientifically and in a more up-to-date manner on the basis of research findings and to use research techniques while evaluating their classes when they become active teachers.Therefore, it will be important to determine to which extent the skills aimed to be imparted to pre-service teachers through the SRM course have been acquired by them in terms of the quality and efficiency of this course.In this way, changes and improvements in the curricula can be achieved and contributions can be made for pre-service teachers to become qualified teachers.
When the literature is reviewed, it can be seen that some research studies have been conducted to investigate the attitudes of students taking the SRM course towards research in Turkey.For instance, İlhan, Çelik and Aslan (2016) conducted a study to reveal the attitudes of undergraduate and college students towards scientific research and they found that the students' attitudes towards research are low in general.Küçükoğlu, Taşgın and Çelik (2014) conducted a study on university students and showed that the concepts related to scientific research could not be conceived precisely and correctly by the pre-service teachers with the view that they did not think conducting research was necessary for teachers, but they thought that scientific research would be useful for their professional lives.Polat's (2014) study showed that the attitudes of education faculty students towards scientific research were at the "medium level", that the 4th year students were more willing than the students from the other grades and the male students had higher positive attitudes compared to the female students.Yaşar (2014) conducted a study called "Attitude Scale Development Study for Scientific Research Methods Course: Validity and Reliability" and made a significant contribution to the literature by developing the attitude scale used as the data collection tool in the mentioned study.In their study, Konokman, Tanrıseven and Karasolak (2013) found that the pre-service teachers had positive attitudes towards educational research and that department attended, gender, achievement level from the courses of measurement and evaluation and scientific research techniques and scientific research experiences were the variables not leading to differences in their attitude scores.Biçer, Bozkırlı and Er (2013) found that the attitudes of the 4th year pre-service teachers were more negative than those of the students from the other grade levels.Yenilmez and Ata (2012) reported that the pre-service teachers had a neutral attitude towards scientific research and their attitudes did not differ according to gender and academic achievement, but showed significant differences according to grade level, frequency of future scientific research and type of high school graduated.Korkmaz, Sahin and Yesil (2011) developed the Attitude Scale for Scientific Research which consisted of 30 items in their study conducted to determine the attitudes of the pre-service teachers towards scientific research.Kurt, Izmirli, Firat and Izmirli (2011) revealed that the female students had more positive opinions about the SRM course; the students with a higher grade point average had more positive opinions about the SRM course than the students with a lower grade point average and the higher grade students had more positive opinions than the lower grade students.Ayaydın and Kurtuldu (2010), conducted a study to explore the attitudes of the students in the Department of Fine Arts Education towards the scientific research methods course; and found that fine arts students had a medium level attitude towards the SRM course and they had negative attitude in terms of content, lesson delivery and evaluation.Saracaloğlu (2008) conducted a study to determine the relationship of the graduate students' research competences with their level of academic motivation, anxiety about scientific research and attitudes towards scientific research and concluded that the graduate students' research competency level is "highly competent".In a similar manner, Saracaloğlu, Varol and Ercan (2005) conducted a study to determine the relationship of the graduate students' research competences with their scientific research anxiety and attitudes towards research and statistics and they found that the graduate students were "highly competent".Papanastasiou (2005), in his study of why university students tend to see the research methods course negatively in general, revealed that although the students knew the usefulness of this course, they could not develop a positive attitude towards this course due to reasons such as inability to relate this course to daily life and challenging nature of research.
In light of these studies found in the literature, it is seen that the opinions and attitudes of pre-service teachers about the SRM course have already been examined, but no department-based comparative analysis has been made.In order to compare the attitudes of pre-service teachers from different branches towards the SRM course, it is considered that the independent variable of department is an important variable because it is thought that there may be a difference between the attitudes of pre-service teachers who are educated in different departments towards the SRM course.In this study, therefore, it was considered to be important to investigate whether the attitudes of the students attending different departments of the Gazi Education Faculty in Gazi University towards the SRM course vary significantly depending on the department attended.

Purpose of the Study
In this study, it was aimed to reveal the pre-service teachers' attitudes towards the SRM course.To this end, following research questions were posed.
1. What is the level of the pre-service teachers' attitudes towards the SRM course? 2. Do the pre-service teachers' attitudes towards the SRM course vary significantly depending on the department attended?3. Do the pre-service teachers' attitudes towards the SRM course vary significantly depending on the department attended in the sub-dimensions of the scale used in the study?

Research model
This study employed the survey model.As is known, the survey model aims to describe an existing state as it is.The state, which is the subject of the research is attempted to be described as it is in its own conditions without any intervention (Karasar, 2018, p. 109).In line with this model, in this study, the pre-service teachers' attitudes towards the SRM course, which were taken as the dependent variable, were investigated on the basis of the department attended, which was taken as the independent variable.

Population and sampling of the study
The population of the study is comprised of 308 pre-service teachers who accepted to participate in the study on a volunteer basis out of a total number of 481 pre-service teachers attending the Departments of German Language Education, Arabic Language Education, French Language Education, English Language Education, Philosophy Group Education, Department of primary education and Preschool Teacher Education of the Gazi Education Faculty in Gazi University in the spring term of 2017-2018 academic year and taking the SRM course.The reason for the inclusion of these departments in the population of the study is that the SRM course is offered only in these departments.As all the students in the population of the study were attempted to be reached, no sampling selection was performed.When the sampling size that could represent the population was calculated on the basis of ± 5% error margin, including 214 students out of 481 students in the sampling was found to be enough (Krejcie, & Morgan, 1970).Thus, 308 students who were reached in the current study were accepted to be enough to represent the universe of the study.The distribution of the participating pre-service teachers across departments is given in Table Table 1 As can be seen in Table 1, the highest number of students is from the department of primary education (41.60%).This is followed by the students from the Pre-school Teacher Education Department (25.30%) and from the English Language Department (17.50%).The smallest number of students is from the Philosophy Group Department with 13 (4.20%).The reason for the inclusion of different numbers of students from different departments is the difference among the numbers of students attending different departments.

Data Collection Tool
In this study, 20-item 'Attitude Scale towards Scientific Research Methods Course' developed by Yaşar (2014) consisted of four sub-dimensions was used as the data collection tool.In the scale, the responses to be given to the positive attitude items are scored as follows; "7=Strongly agree, 6=Generally agree, 5=Agree, 4=Very little agree, 3=Disagree, 2=Generally disagree, 1=Strongly disagree" while the responses to be given to the negative attitude items are scored in the reverse order.The scale consisting of four sub-dimensions was found to explain 62.16% of the total variance of the psychological latent construct to be measured by the scale.On the other hand, as a result of the confirmatory factor analysis conducted to confirm the construct revealed by the exploratory factor analysis, the goodness-of-fit indices were found to be as follows; 199.68/166=1.20;RMSEA=.04;CFI=.99;GFI=.92;AGFI=.86;NFI=.96;NNFI=.99;RMR=.18 and SRMR=.05.These findings show that the scale has four sub-dimensions that can measure a single construct.For the internal consistency of the scale, the Cronbach alpha reliability coefficient of the scale was calculated to be .92.This value shows that the scale has a very high internal consistency.According to the data collected in the study, the Cronbach alpha reliability coefficient was found to be .81.

Data Analysis
While examining the pre-service teachers' opinions, which are the dependent variable, according to the independent variable of the department attended, first the normality of the distribution of the opinions was tested.According to the results of the analysis, the distributions were not found to be normal; thus, nonparametric tests such as Kruskal-Wallis test and Mann Whitney U test were used.The significance level was set to be .05.As the distributions were not normal, in the interpretation of the data, median values were taken as the measure of the distribution representing the groups.In the interpretation of the ranges, on the other hand, as the seven-point Likert structure was used, the ranges were interpreted as follows: 1.00-1.84=stronglydisagree, 1.85-2.70=generallydisagree, 2.71-3.56=disagree,3.57-4.42=verylittle agree, 4.43-5.28=agree,5.29-6.14=generallyagree and 6.15-7.00=stronglyagree.

Results
In this study, the pre-service teachers' attitudes towards the SRM course on the basis of the whole scale used as the data collection tool were investigated.To this end, firstly, the normality of the distribution was tested for the whole scale and the obtained results are presented in Table 2.In order to determine the attitudes of the 308 pre-service teachers participating in the study towards the SRM course, first Kolmogorov-Smirnov (K-S) normal distribution test was run (Taşpınar, 2017).Since the distribution was not found to be normal (KS(308)=.06;p<.05), the median value was taken as the group mean value.In this regard, the median value of the pre-service teachers was found to be 4.40 indicating the response option "very little agree" in the scale.That is, the pre-service teachers do not have positive attitudes at the desired levels towards the course.
As the distribution was not found to be normal as a result of the normality of the distribution test conducted on the whole scale, median values were taken as the basis in the examination of the attitudes towards each item.In this connection, the pre-service teachers' attitudes were attempted to be interpreted considering each item in the scale separately.
As the distribution was not normal, when the items were analyzed considering the medians, it was found that the pre-service teachers did not find the SRM course interesting enough according to the item for which the smallest median value was obtained (M=3.00).The level of the pre-service teachers' agreement with the items related to finding themselves successful, preparing a project in this course, being interested in the course, making use of the course in the real life, making great use of the course in the professional life and its being indispensable for the professional career was found to be very little (M=4.00).On the other hand, they disagreed with these items: not attending the classes if the attendance was not mandatory, the course is unimportant, it won't contribute to their development (reverse items M=5.00).In these items, the pre-service teachers can be said to have moderately positive attitudes.In addition, in relation to the items; taking this course will contribute to their problem-solving skills, believing that they will be successful, contribution to their personal development, they were found to "disagree" (M=5.00) and thus the pre-service teachers can be said to have moderately positive attitudes.According to the obtained data, though not at the desired level, the preservice teachers have moderately positive attitudes towards the opinions expressed by the majority of the items.However, they do not have sufficient enough positive attitudes towards the opinions expressed in few items.The SRM course will make a positive contribution to my professional life as much as mathematics will.5.00 7 I think that I will be able to develop myself in the SRM course.5.00 8 I think that the SRM course is very important.5.00 9 In my opinion, the SRM course in unnecessary.

10
The idea of accessing new information by using the knowledge and skills I will learn in the SRM course sounds very interesting to me.I think that research-oriented thinking has an important place in my daily life.5.00 Not: Items 7, 8, 9, 15, 17 were reversely scored.
The pre-service teachers' attitudes towards the SRM course were examined depending on the independent variable of the department attended and the analysis results are presented in Table 4.According to the results of Kruskal-Wallis analysis conducted considering the large differences among the numbers of the students attending different departments and as the distributions were not normal in the English Language Education Department, significant differences were detected between the opinions.In this regard, the pre-service teachers from the Philosophy Group Education Department were found to be in the "agreement" response option (M=5.20) with the highest median value; that is, they can be said to have moderately positive attitude towards the SRM course.Although with a bit lower median values, the pre-service teachers from the Departments of Arabic Language Education, French Language Education and Pre-school Teacher Education were found to have moderately positive attitudes.On the other hand, the pre-service teachers from the Department of English Language Education were found to have the lowest attitude (M=3.87),followed by the pre-service teachers from the department of primary education in the response option "very little agree".Thus, it can be said that the pre-service teachers from these two departments do not have sufficiently positive attitudes.
Whether the pre-service teachers' attitudes towards the SRM course vary significantly depending on the independent variable of the department attended in the four sub-dimensions of the scale was also investigated and the obtained findings are presented in Table 5.When the data related to the normality of the distributions were examined, cases where the distribution was not normal were determined in each sub-dimension and at the same time as there were large differences among the numbers of the students from different departments, Kruskall-Wallis analysis -a non-parametric test-was used to compare the cases of opinion differences.In this respect, except for "daily life-professional relevance" sub-dimension, opinion differences were determined depending on the department attended in the other sub-dimensions.The obtained findings are summarized below.
In the "Importance of Scientific research" sub-dimension, the pre-service teachers from the Department of English Language Education stated that they "very little agree" (M=4.16).While the pre-service teachers from the other departments stated that they "agree" and "generally agree", the pre-service teachers from the Department of Philosophy Group Education stated that they "generally agree", indicating that they have the highest positive attitude (M=5.83).
In the "Cognitive Confidence" sub-dimension, the pre-service teachers from the Department of English Language Education stated that they "very little agree" (M=3.80).All the pre-service teachers from the other departments stated that they "agree" (M=4.60-5.20).Thus, it can be said that except for the pre-service teachers from the Department of English Language Education, all the participating pre-service teachers expressed moderately positive attitudes.
In the "Interest" sub-dimension, the pre-service teachers from the Departments of Philosophy Group Education (M=4.80) and Arabic Language Education (M=4.60)stated that they "agree".The pre-service teachers from the other departments stated that they "very little agree" (M=3.60-4.40).Thus, it can be said that while the pre-service teachers from the Departments of Philosophy Group and Arabic Language Education have moderately positive attitudes towards the SRM course in the "interest" sub-dimension, the pre-service teachers from the other departments have relatively lower level of interest in the course.
In the "Daily Life-Professional Relevance" sub-dimension, the pre-service teachers from the English Language Education stated that they "very little agree" (M=4.12).All the pre-service teachers from the other departments stated that they "agree" (M=4.50-5.25).
When the attitudes of the pre-service teachers towards sub-dimensions of the scale are compared according to the departments in general, it is seen that the pre-service teachers from the Department of English Language Education have partially positive attitudes towards the "importance", "cognitive confidence" and "daily life-professional relevance" sub-dimensions while the pre-service teachers from the other departments have moderately positive attitudes.The most positive attitude is displayed by the pre-service teachers from the Department of Philosophy Group Education.While the pre-service teachers from the Departments of Philosophy Group and Arabic Language Education have moderately positive attitudes in the "Interest" sub-dimension, the pre-service teachers from the other departments can be said to have partially positive attitudes.
In this study, the pre-service teachers from the Department of Philosophy Group Education were found to have more positive attitudes in general and this might be because of the following reasons; the nature of philosophy, they can be more encouraged to ask questions, and they can be curious and think critically in their program.The least positive attitudes were expressed by the pre-service teachers from the Department of English Language Education and this might be due to their general lower motivation towards courses other than content area courses.

Discussion, Conclusion and Implications
As a result of this study, when all the departments were taken together without considering the department variable, it was determined that the pre-service teachers did not find the SRM course interesting enough.In addition, it can be said that the pre-service teachers do not have enough positive attitudes on the basis of the opinions they expressed in relation to sub-dimensions of finding themselves successful, being interested in the lesson, making use of the course very much in their life and professional life and its being indispensable for their career.In a study conducted by Küçükoğlu, Taşgın and Çelik (2014) on university students, it was found that the participating students think that doing research is necessary for teachers, which is a finding parallel to the findings of the current study, yet they also found that the students think that scientific research will be useful in their professional lives, which does not concur with the findings of the results of this study.However, when the fact that the pre-service teachers participating in the study stressed that the SRM course would have some contributions to them is considered, it can be argued that they have a different perspective on the degree of the contribution of the course.In summary, it can be said that the preservice teachers are of the opinion that the SRM course will contribute to them, but this contribution won't be much significant.
In the literature, there is a study conducted by Nartgün, Uluman, Akın, Çelik and Çevik (2008) to elicit the opinions of pre-service teachers about scientific research competencies.They found that the participating pre-service teachers find themselves moderately competent in scientific research methods and they also found significant differences between the students taking the research techniques course and the students not taking this course.In addition, in the literature, there are some studies on the statistics related to the SRM course.One of them was done by Mills (2004) to determine the attitudes of 203 students taking the statistics course towards statistics.Although negative attitudes towards statistics had been reported in general in the previous studies conducted to determine the attitudes of students towards statistics, Mills found that students' attitudes towards statistics were becoming relatively more positive as a result of the works performed by researchers in cooperation with teachers to develop teaching and learning of statistics.In the current this study, though there were no items directly related to the statistics, negative opinions expressed on the data analysis, which is an important dimension of the research process, can lead to the emergence of negative opinions about the scientific research dimension in general.In addition, in the studies conducted by Polat (2014) and Konokman, Tanrıseven and Karasolak (2013), it was revealed that the pre-service teachers had positive attitudes towards educational research.Given that the pre-service teachers participating in this study expressed moderately positive attitudes towards a significant part of the items, it can be argued that the findings of the study concur with the findings reported in the literature.
In addition, according to the obtained findings, the pre-service teachers did not agree with the negative opinions that they would not continue the course if it was not compulsory to attend, that the course was insignificant, that they would not improve themselves and that the course would not contribute to them.Thus, they can be said to have moderately positive attitudes towards these items as well.In addition to this, it was found that the pre-service teachers had moderately positive attitudes in terms of problem-solving skills, preparing projects, believing that they would be successful and its contribution to their development.
In light of all these findings, it can be said that though not at the desired level, the participating pre-service teachers have moderately positive attitudes towards the SRM course.The pre-service teachers' not finding the course interesting enough, yet their feeling interested in it can be seen as a paradox.This might be because of their interest in the course in fact, yet the classes are not delivered interestingly enough.The other remarkable findings of this study are that though the pre-service teachers do not find themselves successful, they believe that they can succeed and that they think that the SRM course will make contributions to their professional lives and daily lives, yet these contributions won't be high.These findings suggest that the content of the SRM course and learning-teaching process have some problems.
When the attitudes of the pre-service teachers were examined according to the department variable, it was found that the pre-service teachers from the Department of Philosophy Group Education have more positive attitudes than the pre-service teachers from the other departments.The pre-service teachers from the Departments of French Language Education, Department of Primary Education, Arabic Language Education, Pre-school Teacher Education and German Language Education were found to have positive attitudes in general.The pre-service teachers from these departments have self-confidence in doing research, believe in the importance of the SRM course, feel interested in the SRM course and think that they can make use of this course in their daily lives.The pre-service teachers from the Department of English Language Education were found to have attitudes at the level of "very little"; that is, they do not have positive attitudes at the required level.Diri (2007), in his study on the attitudes of students towards statistics concluded that attitudes do not differ depending on the department variable.Konokman, Tanrıseven and Karasolak (2013) revealed that the scientific research experience according to the departments of the pre-service teachers did not lead to differentiation in their attitude scores.However, Kurt, İzmirli, Fırat and İzmirli (2011) found that students' opinions about scientific research in the cognitive, psychological, occupational and importance sub-dimensions did not show a significant difference according to the department variable.These findings reported in the literature do not concur with the findings of the current study.This might be because of the fact that these studies were conducted on different sampling groups.
According to the results obtained, it was concluded that the attitudes of the pre-service teachers from the Department of Philosophy Group Education towards the sub-dimensions of "the importance of scientific research", "cognitive confidence", "interest" and "daily life-professional relevance" are higher than those of the pre-service teachers from the other departments.The reason for this is might be the fact that these preservice teachers, due to the nature of their content area, are more encouraged to be involved in discussions, ask questions and feel curious, which are highly important for research methods.The relatively low attitudes of the pre-service teachers from the Department of English Language Education can be explained by their low motivation towards the SRM course and different variables involved in the learning-teaching process.
Pre-service teachers' having positive attitudes towards the SRM course is not just important for the learning-teaching process but also a necessity.The main reason for this is that it is necessary for teachers to examine the results of their lessons, identify problems, develop solutions, and reflect their findings in the practices in their lessons so that effective learning can be rendered.The results of this study showed that the pre-service teachers, who will be the teachers of future, do not have positive attitudes towards the SRM course at the desired level; thus, when they are appointed as teachers in the future, they can experience difficulties in terms of playing an active role in the solution of the problems to be experienced in the learning-teaching process.
Determination of the attitudes towards the SRM course, which forms an important basis for developing research skills, will contribute to professional attitudes of pre-service teachers when they have graduated; thus, will foster their efforts to develop their content knowledge and teaching skills.In this regard, more student-centered environment designs should be included in the learning-teaching process of the SRM course in order for pre-service teachers to achieve greater efficiency from the course and to develop more positive attitudes towards it.
The content of the SRM course should be more related to the departments and changes should be made in such a way to increase students' desire to learn in this course.
More emphasis should be put on the activities that can increase students' motivation towards the SRM course.For this purpose, in-class and out-of-class activities should be designed to be research-oriented in both content courses and other courses.Pre-service teachers can be encouraged to conduct research studies in their own fields.If these research studies can be designed and credited within the scope of their own content area courses, more positive attitudes towards the SRM course can be developed.

Table 2 .
Normality Test and Median Values of the Pre-Service Teachers' Attitudes.

Table 3 .
Pre-Service Teachers' Attitudes towards the SRM Course.

Table 4 .
Pre-service Teachers' Attitudes towards the SRM Course Depending on the Department Attended.

Table 5 .
The Pre-Service Teachers' Attitudes towards the SRM Course Depending on the Department Attended in the Four Sub-Dimensions.