INVESTIGATING PRE-SERVICE EARLY CHILDHOOD TEACHERS’ ATTITUDES TOWARDS THE COMPUTER BASED EDUCATION IN SCIENCE ACTIVITIES

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this study was to investigate pre-service early childhood teachers’ attitudes towards using Computer Based Education (CBE) while implementing science activities. More specifically, the present study examined the effect of different variables such as gender, year in program, experience in preschool, owing a computer, and the frequency of computer usage on pre-service early childhood teachers’ attitudes towards using CBE while implementing science activities. The study was conducted by survey method and the data were collected by using two instruments which were “Demographical Questionnaire” being developed by researchers and “The Scale of Attitude toward Computer Based Education” being developed by Arslan (2006) and adapted by the researchers for early childhood education domain specifically. The sample of this study was 215 freshmen and senior early childhood teacher candidates attending state universities in Ankara. The data were analyzed by conducting t-tests and ANOVA in order to determine the effect of independent variables on CBE attitudes.