مرکز منطقه ای اطلاع رساني علوم و فناوري - REFLECTIVE THINKING LEVELS OF PRIMARY SCHOOL TEACHERS ACCORDING TO SOME VARIABLES AND THE RELEVANCE OF TEACHER QUALITIES IN THEIR MIND TO THE QUALITIES OF REFLECTIVE TEACHER

Abstract :

The main objective of this research is to determine the reflective thinking skill levels of primary school teachers, to examine whether these levels show a significant difference according to teachers’ gender, seniority,branches and to identify teacher qualities that they consider a teacher should have are similar to what extent to characteristics of reflective teacher. Both quantitative and qualitative data were used in the research. In quantitative part, scan size method and in qualitative part interview method were used. Totally 256 primary school teachers who teach Turkish and Mathematics courses in public primary schools in the province of Malatya in the academic year 2010-2011 constitute the population of the research. Quantitative data of the research were collected with Personal Information Form-developed by researchers- and with YANDE scale by Semerci (2007); qualitative data were collected by using semi-structured interview developed by the researchers by creating five open-ended questions. As a result, it is determined that primary school teachers have high level of reflective thinking skill, and there is no significant difference among the levels of reflective thinking according to their seniority, gender and branches. According to the results of qualitative data, primary school teachers show similar qualities with reflective properties of the teacher and which characteristics a teacher should have.