Physical education and sports play an important role in the education of individuals with mental disabilities as well as in the education of normal development individuals. It is of great importance not only in their physical development, but also in their mental and social development. Awareness of individuals with mental disabilities is of great importance for teacher candidates who will be the architects of future generations. In this study, in which awareness of the effects of sports is examined, it is aimed to examine the awareness levels of pre-service teachers who receive education at the undergraduate level about the effects of sports on individuals with mental disabilities in terms of different variables. The sample was determined to represent the universe, and the descriptive research was designed in the general survey model. In addition to the demographic information form, the "Awareness Scale for the Effects of Sports on Mentally Handicapped Individuals" (ZEBSEYFÖ) developed by İlhan and Esentürk (2015) was used as a data collection tool. Participating pre-service teachers who filled in the forms were selected by random method. The research group consists of 404 pre-service teachers from Physical Education, Science, Secondary-School Mathematics, Preschool, Primary School, Psychological Counseling and Guidance, Turkish and Social Studies teaching departments at Kırşehir Ahi Evran University in the 2022-2023 academic year. The scale used consists of a single sub-dimension and 32 items. Statistical analysis of the data was done in SPSS 26.0 package program. The skewness and kurtosis values of the data were checked and after it was seen that they showed a normal distribution, from the parametric tests; t-test and one-factor analysis of variance (One-Way Anova) tests were applied. After reviewing the literature, it has been determined that there are studies that show parallelism with our findings, as well as studies that differ. As a result of the analysis; It was seen that there was no significant difference according to gender, mental disability in the environment, taking special education lessons, department, class, age variables. According to the state of doing sports; It was observed that those who did sports between 1-3 hours had a significantly higher average than those who did not. In order to increase the awareness of pre-service teachers in line with the results; Pre-service teachers can be encouraged to do sports, regardless of department, and physical education lessons can be added to the curriculum, apart from vocational courses. It is thought that our study result will contribute to the literature.
Physical education, sport, awareness, mental disability