THE INVESTIGATION OF TEACHER CANDIDATES’ATTITUDES TOWARDS TEACHING PROFESSION AND PROBLEM SOLVING SKILLS

The main of thisresearch is toexamineteachercandidates' attitudesand problem solvingskills in terms of some variables such as gender, type of program. The participants of the research(n=584) consists of teacher candidates who enrolled at Faculty of Education and those enrolled at Pedagogical Formation Program in a university in Ankara. A Teaching Profession Attitude Scale, Problem Solving Inventory and Individual Information Form were given the participants in order to gather data. According to the results of the research, there was no significant difference between the attitudes of the students attending the Education Faculty and the Pedagogical Formation Program towards the teaching profession, but there was a significant difference between problem solving skills.The results also showed a significant difference between the attitudes of first and last grade students attending the Faculty of Education towards the teaching profession and the problem solving skills of the first and last semester students who continued to the Pedagogical Formation Program.Finally, the attitude and problem-solving skills of all participants did not change according to the gender variable.