Preservice Early Childhood Teachers’ Attitudes towards Values Education

Early childhood is an essential period for development and learning. Therefore, by contributing whole developmental areas, children can be supported to be prepared for their future life. Values education is a part of early childhood education. It encourages children to make decisions through critical thinking about rightand-wrong in a situation and to understand the society in which they live. Genetic and environmental factors are effective on development and learning. Considering that one of the environmental factors affecting the child in the preschool period is the teacher, the teachers' knowledge, skills, behaviors, beliefs and attitudes towards teaching should be investigated. As the literature supported, teachers develop a background in teaching during their undergraduate education. To deeply understand teachers’ knowledge, skills, views, beliefs or attitudes towards a specific issue, studies with preservice teachers can be conducted which may contribute to both teacher development and indirectly child development and learning. Studies about values education conducted with preservice teachers may provide information on how they will address values education in their in-service years. It may also be possible to infer how teacher training programs support teacher candidates in terms of teaching values in early years. In the light of these information, the aim of this study is to investigate 4th year preservice early childhood teachers’ attitudes toward values education. “Values Education Attitude Scale” developed by Yaşaroğlu (2014) will be used during the data collection process. The scale will be applied to approximately 150-200 participants enrolled at public universities. The data will be analyzed using SPSS. Taking into account the related literature, as an expected result it can be stated that, the participants may have positive attitudes toward values educatio