What is the level of inquiry skills of science teacher candidates? Does it change by gender and class level?

© The Turkish Online Journal of Educational Technology.In today’s education system, individuals who are searching, questioning, learning to learn, producing knowledge, reaching knowledge, analyzing information, choosing useful knowledge are needed instead of individuals who are waiting for memorizing and ready information. The expectation of these qualities can be reflected to the school process by differentiating the knowledge and skills to be gained to the students. One of the skills discussed as common basic skills is inquiry skill. In this study, it is aimed to determine the inquiry skills of science teacher candidates and to examine them in terms of gender and class level. The study constitutes a survey research conducted with the participation of a total 247 pre-service teachers receiving education in first, second, third and fourth grades at the Celal Bayar University’s Faculty of Education in Turkey during the spring semester of 2014- 2015 academic years. In the study, ‘Inquiry Skills Scale’ was used in determining the questioning skills of the teacher candidates. The aforementioned inquiry skills scale consists of 14 items and three sub-dimensions (information acquisition, information control and self-confidence). The Kruskall-Wallis and the Mann- Whitney U tests are used along with the descriptive statistics for the analysis of the data. According to the results of the analysis, the ability of the teacher candidates to inquiry skills was found in the ‘above average’ range. When examined in terms of gender, the inquiry skills of the students shows a significant difference in favor of male students according to the gender variable in the subscale of self-confidence. From here, it can be said that the students’ self-confidence towards inquiry skill is higher in male students than in female students. According to the other sub-problem class level, there was no statistically significant difference between the classes. Although there is no significant difference, it is seen that the 4th grade level is higher than the other grade levels when the rank average scores are examined. Some suggestions have been made about the development of inquiry skills for these results