Abstract


PRE-SERVICE HISTORY TEACHERS' OPINIONS ABOUT THE SUBJECT MATTER KNOWLEDGE LESSONS RECEIVED IN UNDERGRADUATE EDUCATION

The purpose of this study was to determine the opinions of pre-service history teachers about the subject matter knowledge lessons which they took in their undergraduate education. It is seen as an important issue to investigate how much effort is spent to gain thinking skills, special field competencies and special teaching methods in subject matter knowledge lessons. This research is a qualitative study aiming to describe the current situation through interviews. The participants of this study comprise 21 senior students,11 females and 10 males, who voluntarily take part and study ‘’History Teaching’’ departments of state universities in various regions of Turkey during the 2019-2020 academic year. To reach the purposes of the study, a structured interview form developed by the researchers by scanning the literature on the evaluation of the subject matter knowledge lessons in the undergraduate program of the history teaching department was used as the data collection tool. A part of the data was collected face to face in the classroom and some of them were collected online through "Google Forms". Data collected through a structured interview form were analyzed by creating themes and codes and interpreted with the help of percentage and frequency tables.  The findings demonstrate that there is a general problem in gaining special field competencies expected from pre-service teachers and ensuring that teachers reach the competence to have students gain the objectives of the curriculum in the subject matter knowledge lessons of history teaching department. It has been determined that pre-service history teachers generally have negative opinions on other subjects, excepting the subject matter knowledge competencies of the faculty members. While most of the pre-service teachers thought that the lecturers they took lessons from were not impartial, more than half of them stated that they did not find the use and teaching of special teaching methods sufficient. In addition, most of the pre-service teachers do not find enough opportunities such as in and out of school archive scans, historical places, museum tours and gaining historical thinking skills in lessons.



Keywords

Pre-service history teachers, history subject matter knowledge, history special field competencies, historical thinking skills





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