Search

Learning is a process of thinking in which the most significant construct is individuals' awareness of their own learning and their own learning process, in other words, of their own metacognition capacity. This prediction study aimed at identifying the relationship between entrepreneurial dispositions and metacognition, and epistemological beliefs that teachers should possess. In line with this, the study focused on the extent to which pre-service teachers' entrepreneurial dispositions were predicted by the variables of metacognition and epistemological beliefs. The participants comprised 516 prospective teachers in a public university in Turkey. The study adopted the correlational research design, and utilised linear regression analyses for the data collected via Metacognition, Epistemological Beliefs, and Entrepreneurial Dispositions Scales. The results of the analyses indicated that "planning" subdimension of the metacognition scale and "Learning depends on ability" and "Learning depends on effort" sub-dimensions of the epistemological beliefs scale predicted entrepreneurial dispositions, positively and significantly. On the other hand, neither "organization" sub-dimension of the former nor "There is only one unchanging truth" subdimension of the latter scale was not able to predict entrepreneurial dispositions.

The social studies course is one of the most appropriate courses for individuals to acquire social and cultural experiences and to have knowledge and experience in these subjects. The social studies course contains a lot of knowledge, skills, and values to enable the individual to know himself and gain a social identity. It is seen how a society expresses its feelings and emotions at different times, on sad or happy days through folk songs, which have an essential place among the literary products used in the course. This study, which aimed to determine the opinions of the prospective social studies teachers regarding the use of folk songs in social studies courses, was carried out with 16 prospective social studies teachers. In this study, a semi-structured interview form was used to collect data. Explanatory and inferential codes that emerged during the analysis were used to explain the qualitative data and relationships. In line with the data obtained, prospective teachers stated that they found the use of folk song-supported teaching activities in social studies teaching useful in ensuring permanence, drawing students' attention, and being fun. They also expressed that it has benefits such as giving an idea about our national culture, presenting values to students, increasing intelligibility, ensuring that traditions and customs are conveyed from generation to generation, and providing students with different perspectives.

Current developments have led teachers to use different methods and techniques in their instruction processes. When it is considered that student-centred instruction methods and techniques are more effective, it is important to include methods and techniques that will make students more active and ensure their active participation in the instruction process. One of these techniques is educational games. The objective of this study is to obtain the views of social studies teachers about using educational games. This study used a qualitative approach. The study group consisted of 15 social studies teachers working in the secondary schools of Kars, Turkey. The data were collected with a semi-structured interview form prepared by the researchers. In order to explain the collected qualitative data and to determine the relationships, the explanatory and deductive codes that emerged during the analysis were used. Based on the data obtained, it was found out that the social studies teachers thought that educational games were a technique which provided a more permanent learning environment with fun. It was also determined that the social studies teachers believed that educational games should be entertaining, instructive, and suitable for students' levels and related to class topics and that using the educational game technique was beneficial for supporting the permanence of social studies instruction processes, active student participation, and strengthening the gained knowledge. Based on these results, the researchers recommended to improve educational games by deploying them in a more effective manner and including them more frequently.

This study aims to analyse opinions of social studies prospective teachers towards out-of-school learning. It was conducted with 12 prospective teachers who were at their final year at Kafkas University Education Faculty, Social Studies Teaching Department. In this qualitative study, phenomenological design was adopted, and the data was collected with semi-structured interview form which was developed by the researcher. To explain qualitative data and to find relationships, explanatory and inferential codes during analysis were adopted. Based on the results obtained from this study, prospective teachers expressed that they had inadequate knowledge about out-of-school learning, and out-of-school learning may present advantageous to learning process such as learning with doing-experiencing, permanence of subjects, and materialisation of information. Additionally, regarding out-of-school learning, prospective teachers expressed that there may be problems with time and incorrect learning practices. Recommendations were presented for these results.