We are living in an age where knowledge is rapidly produced and consumed. In this period, the future of the individual and the society depends on accessing, using and producing information. This situation requires a qualified education and first literacy teaching which is the foundation of it. Primary school is the foundation of everything; likewise, the first literacy learning is the foundation of learning (Gunes, Uysal and Tac, 2016). First literacy is to create a new communication and interaction channel for the individual by teaching the symbols of humankind that it created in ten thousand years. Education performs a great miracle by making a seven-year old child comprehend this script that humankind developed in ten thousand years within a seven- or eight-month period (Guleryuz, 2001). It is desired for and expected of the children who start the first grade in primary school at the level of illiteracy to reach the level of basic literacy with qualified first literacy education under the supervision of an effective program, equipped teacher (Sagirli, 2015). Education in cursive handwriting in our country has started in Ataturk era. Ataturk demonstrated examples of the New Turkish Latin Letters on the blackboard with the cursive handwriting. Elderly and young people of the generation of Ataturk era have learned the cursive handwriting very well and used for many years. Many documents of that period such as diplomas, identity cards, registry of deeds etc. have been prepared with cursive handwriting in a clear, cursive and aesthetic form (Gunes, 2006). In our country, it has been decided to start the first literacy education with the cursive handwriting under the scope of the 2004 draft program. For nearly thirteen years, our students are becoming literate with cursive handwriting. There are many studies in literature that examine the opinions of teachers, students, and parents about the cursive handwriting. The aim of the concerned study is to express the view from the perspective of the parents of the gifted and talented students on the practice of cursive handwriting in first literacy education. Within the scope of the research, interviews were conducted with the parents of the gifted and talented students and their opinions were taken about starting the first literacy with the practice of the cursive handwriting. All of the parents are the parents of gifted and talented children who are attending primary school. The data collected during the 2016-2017 academic year have been obtained by face-to-face interviews. The answers of the parents are recorded and then reported. Screening model is used in the study that is designed by content analysis. The research is a qualitative study. Recommendations are brought at the end of the research.

This research reflects neoliberal economic policies by demonstrating the privatization of education in Turkey. The increase in the number of students of private schools and private schools in Turkey along with the relationship between public education investments and household income of education have been explained by using the document analysis technique from qualitative research methods. As in many countries, public education in Turkey has been removed from the basic human rights and commercialized and transformed into a commodity that has been bought and sold. Neoliberal transformation aims to generate a strong and dependent structure that eliminates political and economic freedoms. The documents published by the Ministry of National Education and the Turkish Statistical Institute were obtained from the relevant institutions and the data were analysed. It has been concluded that education has undergone a rapid privatization in Turkey, while investments in public education have decreased rapidly. Also the funds required to be allocated to public schools have been transferred to private schools, and the education rights of the children of poor families have been diminished.

This study investigated prospective mathematics teachers’ reflections on the experience of designing and conducting one-to-one clinical interviews with middle school students in the context of an elective course on use of video in teacher learning. Prospective teachers were asked to write about weaknesses and strengths in student understanding as well as their own performance as an interviewer in terms of asking questions and responding to student thinking in their reflections on conducting clinical interviews. Furthermore, prospective teachers were also asked to reflect on what they would do differently in order to conduct better clinical interviews.  Nature of prospective teachers’ reflections were analyzed by using existing frameworks (through constructs of reflection-on-action and reflection-for-action) and by using thematic analysis. Results of data analyses revealed that prospective teachers had more difficulties in providing meaningful reflection-for-action which was related to alternative decisions and planning for future similar interviews. Thematic analysis results revealed prospective teachers’ learning were grouped under three categories: conducting clinical interviews as part of being a teacher, complexity of conducting clinical interviews, and personal theories about middle school students. There are implications for both teacher learning and research.

It is important for pre-service teachers to know the conceptual difficulties they have experienced regarding the concepts of multiplication and division in fractions and problem posing is a way to learn these conceptual difficulties. Problem posing is a synthetic activity that fundamentally has multiple answers. The purpose of this study is to analyze the multiplication and division of fractions problems posed by pre-service elementary mathematics teachers and to investigate how the problems posed change according to the year of study the pre-service teachers are in. The study employed developmental research methods. A total of 213 pre-service teachers enrolled in different years of the Elementary Mathematics Teaching program at a state university in Turkey took part in the study. The “Problem Posing Test” was used as the data collecting tool. In this test, there are 3 multiplication and 3 division operations. The data were analyzed using qualitative descriptive analysis. The findings suggest that, regardless of the year, pre-service teachers had more conceptual difficulties in problem posing about the division of fractions than in problem posing about the multiplication of fractions.

The aim of the present study was to elucidate Mexicans teachers’ attitudes toward school inclusion and disability.  To achieve this goal, 119 regular education and 88 special education teachers answered The Opinions Relative to Integration of Students with Disabilities scale.  Subsequent analyses revealed that attitudes to both groups were similar in terms of direction but dissimilar in magnitude factor. In addition, while the attitude structure in both samples involved three factors, these were unique to each group: Regular education teachers (Perceived Benefits and Negative Effects inside the Inclusive Classroom/Performance inside the Inclusive Classroom, Teaching Ability/Education System, Performance inside the Inclusive Classroom/Education System) and the special education teachers group (Perceived Benefits inside the Inclusive Classroom/Education System, Teaching Ability/Performance inside the Inclusive Classroom, Perceived Benefits and Negative Effects inside the Inclusive Classroom/Performance inside the Inclusive Classroom). Theoretical and applied implications of these findings are discussed in this paper.

The aim of this study is to review the academic papers written in Turkey on the subject of school readiness, with regard to one of the dimensions of school readiness, that of schools’ readiness for children. The examinations were carried out using one of the qualitative research designs, namely the nested case study design. The study universe consists of 45 articles in Turkish that include the subject of school readiness published in 26 academic journals between the years 2012-2017. With the purposeful sampling method, 14 academic papers that include the dimension of schools’ readiness for children were taken as the study sample. The obtained data were analyzed by descriptive content analysis. The analysis results show that half of the studies reviewed were published in the year 2014. It was observed that in the papers, among the components of the dimension of schools’ readiness for children, the schools’ physical readiness component was most often mentioned. In the articles including the schools’ physical readiness component, it was observed that mainly, findings indicating that schools were not physically suitable for first-year pupils’ level of physical development had been made. As for the component of teachers’ readiness, research findings were accessed relating to the fact that teachers were not prepared for students in terms of their attitudes and values as well as their professional knowledge and skills. Moreover, in the articles, in terms of readiness of the schedule for students, findings were accessed regarding the fact that primary school programmes were not suitable for the levels of the students or for their levels of readiness.

Building a teacher-student relationship is important for creating trust, mutual understanding and respect. The interaction of teacher and students can be found using the 48-item Questionnaire on Teacher Interaction. The result is the Model for Interpersonal Teacher Behavior, consisting of four dimensions, which are further divided into eight sectors to evaluate the teacher. The main goal of our study was to show how the teacher and students perceive the environment of the class, whether their views match, and whether it is a statistical significant dependence among different sectors of the model teacher-students interaction. The sample size consisted of 63 Slovak students of 12th grade and their teacher of biology. Our results have shown that the teacher has evaluated herself similarly to the students, but without a statistical significant difference. In monitoring of the relationship of scales in the whole group of respondents, in the group of male and female respondents we showed statistically significant differences between the sectors. Using of Questionnaire on Teacher Interaction can help mutual knowing of students and teachers and the creation of positive relationships.

The aim of this study is to determine the problems, the solutions and the suggestions of the school principals and teachers towards the Syrian refugee students in the primary schools in Turkey. The research group of the study included four school principals and six teachers. The research was conducted by qualitative methods. The results revealed that the school principals mostly live communication, adaptation, accreditation, absenteeism, psychological and financial problems related to Syrian refugee students. Teachers also have problems such as communication problems with these students. Principals have opened ‘support rooms’ for these students; have worked for adaptation of these students, have been in contact with the families. The teachers opened literacy courses and worked to socialize these students with their classmates. Both principals and teachers have primarily proposed the creation of specific curricula for these students and the activities to solve the problem of language and cohesion for these students.

Children have a basic knowledge of birds that they observe during their everyday life either in their garden, other gardens, round the house, walking in the local area or in the yard on school gardens. A total of 515 children, aged 3 to 16 (249 girls and 266 boys) enrolled in southern Brazilian public preschools, primary school and secondary schools, were invited to participate in this exploratory study. A semi-structured interview was conducted with 206 pupils asking to name which birds they knew, where they had seen these birds, which ones live around home, which they had seen further away. Additionally, they were asked which birds they knew from a list and the source of this knowledge where they had learned about the birds. They were asked to draw on a sheet of paper a representation of what the word “bird” meant to them. Results show the importance of everyday observations rather than beyond formal education in the children knowledge. Children from the earliest years notice birds in their everyday lives, and build a bank of knowledge, gradually acquiring an understanding of adaptation to a variety of habitats. Children notice birds in their lives to differing extent and sources according to the culture in which they are immersed. Experiences of seeing or finding out about birds are encapsulated for many children in the form of narratives and contribute to their mental models of birds and their habitats on which they will drew in formal science later (Biology and Environmental Education). Educational implications are discussed.

The aim of this qualitative case study is to investigate prospective mathematics teachers’ subject matter knowledge of the underlying concepts of standard and nonstandard algorithms used to solve the problems with whole numbers. Twenty three prospective mathematics teachers enrolled in the Elementary Mathematics Education Program of one of the most successful universities in Turkey were the participants of the study. The data was collected through four tasks containing basic algorithms. More specifically, the Ones Task assessed participants’ understanding of the underlying place value concepts of standard algorithms. The Andrew Task and the Doubling Task required participants to conceptualize and interpret nonstandard strategies. In the Division Task, participants were expected to provide in-depth explanation for the difference between multiplication and division and between partitive division and measurement division. The content analysis method was used to analyze the data. The results of the study revealed that more than half of the prospective mathematics teachers had knowledge about the place value of 1 in addition and subtraction, and also multiplication. However, most of the prospective teachers could not explain the underlying principle and the meaning of the nonstandard algorithm in subtraction. Similar to their knowledge on subtraction, prospective teachers’ knowledge on division was limited.

One of the central aspects of displacement and migration is resilience on behalf of the affected individuals. UNHCR reports that the number of displaced people around the world reached 65 million by the end of 2015. In another report UNHCR states that the number of Syrian refugees in Iraq is 233,224. While IOM reports that the number of the internally displaced persons in Iraq between 2014 and 2016 reached to 3.4 million. As it is crucial to communication and, thus, survival, language is vital to promoting resilience of such people. Nowadays, English language learning provides numerous opportunities for individuals to succeed; hence, it is essential in building resilience among displaced populations. The current study aimed to explore resilience level of the displaced adolescents in Iraq, also to verify the impact of English language learning on their lives. The study has been conducted in camp and non-camp schools via the delivery of a CD-RISC-25 questionnaire as quantitative method, followed by interviews as qualitative method. The results concluded that the participants had medium resilience level, and learning English plays different roles in building resilience of the participants.

The aim of this study is to determine the problem solving skills and science process skills of six year-old children who attended kindergarten and whether or not there is a difference in problem solving skills and science process skills of children receiving and not receiving the education with GEMS program. In the study using the experimental model with pre-test, post-test and control group, the sample group consisted of a total of 25 children including 11 children in experimental group and 14 children in control group who attended the preschool education. The “GEMS Program” was applied throughout a school year after applying pre-test to the children in the experimental group. In the scope of the study, “General Information Form” to obtain the data about the children and their families, “Parental Evaluation Form” including the evaluation of the parents about their children, “Problem Solving Scale in Science Education (PSSSE)” to determine the problem solving skills of the children and “Science Processes Observation Form (SPOF)” to measure the science process skills of the children were used. According to the results of the study, while a statistically significant difference was observed between the Problem Solving Scale in Science Education mean scores of the children in the experimental group who participated in the GEMS Education Program and of the children in control group, no statistically significant difference was observed between the mean scores obtained by the children in the experimental group from Science Processes Observation Form and the mean scores of the children in the control group.

Individuals face negative events throughout their lives and such events can cause problems in every aspect of life. A high level of resilience is required to cope with such negative events. There are various factors that affect resilience. Hope is one of those factors. This factor provides a strong structure to individuals and keeps identified objectives alive. Based on this view, the aim of this study was to investigate the relationship between resilience and constant hope of students studying in a sports science department. Accordingly, the study group of this study consisted of 203 students with 91 female and 112 male students studying in a sports science faculty/school of physical education and sports of universities. The data collection tools of this study were the “Resilience Scale” and the “Constant Hope Scale”. Additionally, to collect information about the students, the “Personal Information Form” developed by the researchers was adopted during the data collection process. The analysis of the obtained data was done with descriptive statistics, t-test for independent two groups, one- way variance analysis (Anova), and Pearson Correlation. To determine which groups caused the statistical difference after one-way variance analysis (Anova), the Tukey HSD multiple comparative test was applied. The results of the study indicated that the data obtained on a scale basis had normal distribution. While there was no significant difference for gender between the relationship of resilience and constant hope, there was a statistically significant difference between different age groups. Additionally, the correlation analysis indicated that there was a positive, moderate level relationship between the two scales.

The purpose of the study is to reveal the effect of cooperative learning on language skills in an English course. The study was carried out for 5 weeks with 66 students studying at the 10th grade at an Anatolian high school in the district of Karadeniz Eregli in Zonguldak during the fall term of the 2015-2016 academic year. The design of the study was ‘nonequivalent control groups pre-test post-test’ which is one of quasi-experimental designs. Data were gathered using an achievement test measuring students’ vocabulary knowledge, grammar knowledge, reading comprehension and listening skills. Results showed that cooperative learning had a larger effect on vocabulary knowledge, grammar, listening and reading skills compared to traditional method.

The aim of this study is to explain and predict prospective preschool teachers’ academic achievements depending on goal orientations they adopt, their critical thinking dispositions and self-regulation skills. Research sample constitutes of 265 prospective preschool teachers attending the Faculty of Educational Sciences in Cukurova University. Research data were collected with the 2x2Achievement Goal Orientations Scale, Self-Regulation Questionnaire and Critical Thinking Disposition Scale. Demographical information about prospective teachers’ gender, age, grade level and academic grade point averages were obtained with the personal information form. For the analysis of research data, One-Way Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) and discriminant analysis were used. In this study; it was concluded that prospective teachers with high level of learning approach orientation, critical thinking disposition and self-regulation skills had higher levels of academic achievement. However, it was determined that distinguishing variables among prospective preschool teachers with low, medium and high level of academic achievement included learning approach, performance approach goal orientation and critical thinking disposition and self-regulation skills. Correct classification percentage of distinguishing variables according to prospective preschool teachers’ levels of academic achievement was determined as 48.8%. Considering the fact that prospective teachers’ achievement-goal orientations, critical thinking dispositions and self-regulation skills may increase their academic achievement and shape their future teaching performances, it is suggested to implement programs that will contribute to the development of such skills and orientations among prospective preschool teachers.

The aim of this research; secondary, high school and university levels of the students to understand the concepts related to ecology of Bayburt in Turkey. In this study, a progressive research method was used. In this method, conceptual understanding test was used as data collection tool. Open-ended test questions were used in this study. The test consisted of 150 students, 50 were from the secondary school, 50 were from the high school and 50 from the university in Bayburt. The data obtained from the test indicate that the meanings of the ecological concept are in different categories and that this concept is not fully understood by the students at all three levels of learning. While students at secondary level relate the concepts related to ecology to their everyday use, high school and university students have more scientific definitions in their descriptions. In addition, misconceptions regarding these concepts have been identified at all levels of learning.

This study aims to evaluate elementary school math teachers' self-efficacy beliefs about classroom management. With the aim of investigating elementary school math teachers' self-efficacy beliefs about classroom management, a classroom management self-efficacy scale was developed.  The 5 point likert scale is composed of 46 items. The scale was applied to 142 math teachers working at elementary schools in Diyarbakir central district. Data were analyzed in terms of gender, seniority, classroom population and weekly course load. To analyze the data, t-test, one way variance analysis (ANOVA), Scheffe and LSD tests were used. The results showed that the math teachers have a positive self-efficacy belief of classroom management and that male teachers are better at maintaining discipline in class. In addition, the research shows that teachers with more experience are better at course design and classroom management and that classroom population has an effect on math teachers' self-efficacy beliefs about classroom management.

The aim of sports and physical effect on the course chosen and the selection (choosing different courses) students to determine the difference between the levels of social skills. Research, Sports and Physical Activities are important in determining the contribution of the social skills of course. Research elective sports and physical activities screening to determine their level of social skills among students taking the course and take the 11-14 age model is designed. The population of the 2015- 2016 academic year in the fall semester research, Malatya affiliated school in sports and physical activities constitute 11-14 age students choose the courses. Elective sports and physical activity as a data collection tool for taking the course and receive a questionnaire for students to determine their level of social skills are used. The survey consists of a personal information form and social skills inventory to determine the defining characteristics of the students in the first chapter. In the evaluation of the data obtained as a number descriptive statistical methods, percentage, mean, standard deviation is used. in comparing quantitative data between two independent groups of continuous man-Whitney U test for continuous quantitative comparison of data between more than two independent groups Kruskal wallis test. Kruskal wallis complementary test to determine differences in man-to-Whitney test after test. Research results in emotional expressivity, sensitivity, social expressivity, social sensitivity, social control, social skills and physical effect on the total level of the sport was concluded to be higher in the group selects the course.

The aim of this study is to investigate the empathic tendency levels of physical education teacher candidates according to some variables. Study group consists of 117 pre service physical education and sports students (74 women and 43 men) of Kafkas University in the fall semester of 2015/2016 academic year. “Personal Information Form” and the "Empathic Tendency Scale" which developed by Dokmen was used to collect data. In the evaluation of data, firstly, normality hypothesis and Shapiro Wilk and Levene tests for homogeneity of variances have been used. In paired comparisons, independent samples t-test and in comparison of more than one group, one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) and Tukey multiple comparison test have been used. SPSS 21 statistical package program was used and the results were considered significant at p <0.05 level. As a result of the study, it can be said that gender, age, class, place of education, parent education level and family monthly income variables did not affect the empathic tendency levels of the physical education teacher candidates.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the meanings assigned by pre-service teachers to the wastepaper basket and waste (crumpled) papers in their drawings of a scientist. The study was carried out with 220 pre-service teachers during the 2015-2016 academic years. A phenomenological research method was used. First, the pre-service teachers were administered the ‘Draw-A-Scientist Test’ in order to identify their images of a scientist and then they were asked to describe and explain the scientist they drew. And a semi-structured interview was performed with the 34 pre-service teachers who included a wastepaper basket and waste paper in their drawings in order to identify the meanings assigned to the wastepaper and wastepaper basket by these teachers. The data were analysed by using content analysis. The results of the analysis showed that with these figures the pre-service teachers revealed their belief that when scientists conduct research, they follow a confirmatory experimental process in a similar manner to the way school science experiments. Based on these results, it can be suggested in the analysis of the drawings that waste paper and wastepaper baskets can be regarded as indicators of the stereotypical image of scientists and of the scientific method they use.