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The purpose of this study is to find out pre-service teachers' views about the use of technology in science and middle school mathematics courses. For this purpose, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 30 pre-service teachers studying in a university in Central Anatolia Region during the spring semester of 2017-2018 academic year. The obtained data were analyzed using content analysis by the researchers. According to the findings, pre-service teachers thought that computer, smart board, projector, laboratory equipment, notebook, and pencil are the main technologies that can be used in the classroom. The participants also thought that presentation and video processing programs make course interesting and enjoyable, visualize the topic, make learning easier, and enable the permanent learning. However, they also stated that preparing a presentation and video processing program may be time consuming and boring if it is used throughout the course; and the program may not be useful for every subject. The participants found blogs and web pages useful since they give opportunities to share course content, materials, and information, make announcements to make students prepared for the course. Almost all the participants believed that technological equipment of their classroom definitely affect their teaching. Namely, in an ill-equipped class, the students would have difficulty in learning, tend to memorize things; also their attitudes, interests, and motivations towards the course, and participation in the lesson would be affected; and their learning would not be permanent.

The present study investigated the relationship between pre-service science teachers' epistemological beliefs and perceptions of a constructivist learning environment. The Turkish version of Constructivist Learning Environment Survey and Schommer's Epistemological Belief Questionnaire were administered to 531 pre-service science teachers attending seven public universities in Turkey. For data analysis, the Statistical Package for Social Sciences 20 program was used and correlation analysis was conducted to investigate the relationship between the participants' epistemological beliefs and perceptions of a constructivist learning environment. Also, descriptive analysis was conducted to determine their epistemological beliefs and perceptions of a constructivist learning environment. The results showed that the more sophisticated epistemological beliefs the participants have, the more constructivist learning environments they prefer, and positive/negative relationships were found among subscales of the two scales. Moreover, the results revealed that pre-service science teachers have relatively sophisticated epistemological beliefs, and generally prefer more constructivist learning environments. The implications were discussed.

This study investigated the opinions of teachers participated in 'This Is My Work' project competition on the applicability of the competition, the difficulties they faced and its contributions to science education. In this study, phenomenology which is one of the qualitative research methods was employed. Data was collected with four science teachers in 2014-2015 academic year in Kayseri. Semi-structured interview was used as a data collection tool. Interview form was formed and was controlled by three science education experts. Data analysis was conducted through descriptive analysis. Based on findings, the participants encountered difficulties in respect to time, cost and place during project preparation process. In conclusion, the project competition positively affected the students' achievement. Nonetheless, the participants stated that project assessments should be fair, project preparation period should last longer, and should reach the large masses. As a suggestion, it is believed that clearly notifying students and teachers of project assessment project and selecting the assessment jury among stakeholders (teachers, students, managers, parents, etc.) is important. [Paper presented at the International Eurasian Educational Research Congress (EJERCongress 2015) (2nd, Ankara, Turkey, June 8-10, 2015).]

The purpose of this research was to examine pre-service science teachers' academic motivation and academic self-efficacy toward biology. The sample consisted of 369 pre-service science teachers who enrolled in the faculty of education of two universities in Turkey. Data were collected through Academic Motivation Scale (AMS) (Glynn & Koballa, 2006) and Academic Self-efficacy Scale (ASES) (Woo, 1999). The findings revealed that pre-service science teachers' academic self-efficacy and academic motivation toward biology are high. Additionally, combination of the independent variables was significantly related to the academic self-efficacy scores, while it was not significantly related to the academic motivation. More specifically, it was found that only university variable made a statistically significant contribution to the prediction of pre-service science teachers' academic motivation and academic self-efficacy. There were strong, positive correlations between pre-service science teachers' academic motivation and academic self-efficacy and subdimensions of AMS and ASES except "test anxiety". The relationship of test anxiety with all of the subdimensions was small.