AN EVALUATION OF RESEARCH PROJECT COURSE IN FACULTIES OF EDUCATION: THE CASE OF SCIENCE STUDENT TEACHERS

The course of Research Project in Teacher Education Programs in Turkey is an elective course and aims to equip the student teachers with abilities to conduct action research in their classrooms. In this course the student teachers are trained to determine a research topic, to review the related research, to use the literature to clarify a research problem, to design a research methodology for data collection, to analyze the collected data, to prepare a research report, and to make a presentation in front of a jury. Besides, the course aims to raise student teachers’ awareness for research degrees in post-graduate education and to have experiences for undertaking action research. From this base, the aim of this study is to determine whether this course reaches its aims. The student teachers who enrolled in this course during 2009-2010 academic year were selected as the study sample. The sample consists of 25 science student teachers and asked to evaluate the course in terms of the above stated aims. To collect data a questionnaire was developed and implemented to the sample. The data were analyzed. The results indicated that they are some extent able to review literature, to develop data collection tools, to design their research methodology but they are very little able to analyze their collected data. This result shows that during the Research Project course more emphasis should be given to analysis techniques of data.