Considerable amount of research studies strongly suggest that early childhood teachers’ implicit beliefs and theories are a predictor of their in- class behaviors or instruction, and thus beliefs are considered a reliable tool for examining practice. Since the late 1980s, there has been a considerable amount of attention on the study of teachers’ beliefs as indicators of the actual classroom behaviors of teachers, and subsequently the outcomes of children (Fang, 1996; Kagan, 1988). Following Clark and Peterson’s (1986) work on teacher taught processes, a new line of research is created which focuses on the role of implicit beliefs in guiding instruction (e.g. Spodek, 1988; Fang, 1996; Isenberg, 1990; Kagan, 1992; Pajares, 1992, Yonemura, 1986). In their model, researchers defined implicit beliefs as the ideas about instruction that teachers develop from their personal experience and practical knowledge in contrast to the explicit theories that are taught in college courses and are included in the professional literature. The underlying idea beneath this interest was that teachers’ decisions in planning, teaching and assessing would be best understood by understanding what teachers believe to be important and what they believe not to be important (Charlesworth et al., 1993). While recent research demonstrate strong evidence for the need to study teachers’ implicit beliefs and theories in order to understand their classroom practices, studying prospective teachers’ beliefs appears to be critical equally. Prospective teachers’ past educational experiences, and preconceptions of teaching as a profession which are stemmed out of (based on) thousands of hours of observation of teachers, good and bad, over the previous fifteen or so years are all in effect in the teachers they are about to become (Clark, 1988). Understanding beliefs of prospective teachers is especially important in Turkey recently because teacher education practices is going through serious revision at the moment as an initial step for future reform movements for improving current teacher training practices in all grades including early childhood education. The present study is an effort in understanding the beliefs of Turkish prospective early childhood teachers regarding developmentally appropriate practices. For this study of preservice teachers’ beliefs in Turkey, the American Developmentally Appropriate Practices (DAP) perspective was chosen as the point of reference from which we could best understand and examine the current situation in early childhood teacher education field. DAP is widely accepted in the U.S. as the philosophy upon which “best practices” in curriculum and instruction are built, and it has also had a great deal of influence upon beliefs and practices throughout the world in recent years (McMullen et al., 2005). The study done on the beliefs of Turkish in-service early childhood education teachers about developmentally appropriate practices in early childhood education revealed that Turkish teachers beliefs were closer to the developmentally appropriate side of the developmentally appropriate versus developmentally inappropriate continuum considering the main points of Developmentally Appropriate Practices (DAP) curriculum such as active, hands on learning, dramatic play and activities related to children’s needs and interests (Erdiller & McMullen, 2003). An additional concern of the study is to portray the profile of early childhood teacher education students in terms of their background characteristics. The questions that were addressed during this study were: (1) How are Turkish preservice early childhood teachers’ beliefs characterized in terms of developmentally appropriate practices? (2) How do grade level, type of high school, socioeconomic status, and family characteristics relate to self-reported beliefs regarding developmentally appropriate practice? (3) How does the profile of preservice early childhood teachers look like in Turkey?

The participants of the study included 507 preservice teachers enrolled in the early childhood education programs of the five universities (four public and one private) located in Ankara. Of the 507 students who participated in the study 133 (26,2 %) were first year, 149 (29,4 %) were second year, 117 (23,1 %) were third year and 108 (21, 3%) were fourth year students. The data for the study was collected towards the end of the school year 2004-2005 so all the students who participated in the study were completed all the courses required for that year. The Teacher Beliefs Scale (Charlesworth et al, 1991) is a 36-item, 5-point Likert-type scale, which measures the strength of endorsement in a Developmentally Appropriate Practices (DAP) philosophy. The instrument, based on the National Association of Education for Young Children’s (NAEYC) first position statement on DAP (Bredekamp, 1987) covers most aspects of early childhood curriculum as specified in NAEYC’s guidelines, which are curriculum goals, teaching strategies, guidance of socioemotional development, language development and literacy, cognitive development, physical development, aesthetic development, motivation, and assessment. The Demographic and Information Questionnaire was developed in order to get demographic information from the prospective teachers who participated in the study. The questionnaire included items about background characteristics such as the grade level, type pf high school, monthly family income, mothers’ and father’s education and occupation, number of siblings, housing information, number of people living in the household and the financial support that the participants receive.

The results that will be presented in this section are organized to address each research question. This section includes, Turkish preservice early childhood teachers’ beliefs characterized in terms of developmentally appropriate practices, the relationships between preservice teacher demographic values and self-reported beliefs regarding developmentally appropriate practice, and the profile of preservice early childhood teachers in Turkey. Descriptive statistics (frequencies, percentages, means and standard deviation) are used to report the data gathered through demographic information questionnaire and 5-point Likert-type scale in order to examine the profile of Turkish preservice early childhood teachers’ and the characteristics of their self-reported beliefs regarding developmentally appropriate practices. One-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) was performed to determine the effect of grade level, type of high school, monthly family income, and mothers’ and fathers’ educational level on preservice teachers’ self-reported beliefs about developmentally appropriate practices. In order to assess the first research question the mean scores for the TBS were analyzed. The total mean TBS score of Turkish preservice early childhood teachers was 131, 39 (SD 11,77) and the mean scores for each of the individual TBS items are listed in Table 2. The possible range of TBS scores is 95, 00 to 163, 00. TBS items which have a mean score higher than 4.00 (indicating very strong beliefs) included items related to activities based on development (with the highest mean of score of 4,69), children plan/implement own work, input from parents, dramatic play, teacher observation for evaluation, teacher- child interaction, encourage child social interaction, adults moving around the classroom, learning through active exploration, and children’s freedom of choice, activities responding to interest, Children learning through interaction with other children, reading stories to children, children involving in establishing rules, and planned outdoor activities. On the other hand the TBS item with mean scores lower than 2, 50 (indicating very weak beliefs) addressed whole group instruction (the lowest mean score of all items; 2, 17). Worksheets and workbooks, and teaching each subject separately appear to have lower scores compared to the other items. 4.00 and 2.50 indicating the high and low mean scores were decided by the researcher as the score 4.00 stands for the rating, important in the questionnaire and 2.50 is the mean score of the ratings, quite unimportant (2.00) and fairly important (3.00) in the TBS. Considering the descriptive statistics of the TBS items, we can infer that Turkish preservice teachers’ beliefs are closer to the child-centered end of the teacher-directed versus child-centered continuum. While teacher observation, responding to children’s interests and needs, active learning, interaction between the teacher and the individual child, children planning and implementing their own work and play are among the basic principles of child-centered curriculum, learning materials such as worksheets and workbooks, teaching isolated subjects at isolated times, and talking to the whole group and expecting children all to do and learn the same thing at the same time are among inappropriate practices defined by the NAEYC guidelines (Bredekamp & Copple, 1997). The findings of the study revealed that there is no significant difference between preservice teachers’ self-reported beliefs based on their demographic values (i.e. grade level, type of high school, monthly family income, and mothers’ and fathers’ educational level). However, even though the difference between preservice teachers’ self-reported beliefs and grade level was found to be not statistically significant, the total TBS score of the students which may reflect a stronger endorsement of developmentally appropriate beliefs seemed to increase as the grade level increases (See Table 4). This may suggest that as students receive formal training related to the field, they tend to favor developmentally appropriate practices more. The answer to the third research question will be further discussed in detail.