DETERMINATION OF PRE-SERVICE CLASSROOM TEACHERS’ COGNITIVE STRUCTURES OF COMMUNICATION, COOPERATION AND DECISION-MAKING SKILLS VIA A WORD ASSOCIATION TEST

Abstract

The purpose of the current study is to determine pre-service classroom teachers’ cognitive structure regarding communication, cooperation and decision-making skills, which are among the basic life skills addressed in the Life Sciences curriculum. The current study employed qualitative research methods. The study group of the current research is comprised of 111 pre-service classroom teachers attending the Department of Classroom Teacher Training in a state university located in the Marmara region and having taken the course “Life Sciences Teaching”. A word association test prepared to test the skills addressed in the current study was used as the data collection tool. This word association test focused on three of the basic life skills; communication, cooperation and decision-making skills. By examining the words written by the pre-service teachers related to the these three skills in a detailed manner, a frequency table showing how many times the concepts were repeated was prepared and on the basis of the cut-off points, concept maps were developed. As a result of the analysis, it was found that the pre-service classroom teachers produced a total of 154 concepts in relation to the three skills. When the concepts most frequently produced by the pre-service teachers were examined, it was found that “human” is the concept most frequently produced for the communication skill, “group” is the concept most frequently produced for the cooperation skill and “reaching a conclusion” is the concept most frequently produced for the decision-making skill.