The term self-efficacy was stated by Bandura (1986) as an important component of social cognitive theory. Self-efficacy was defined as “judgments about how well one can organize and execute courses of action required to deal with prospective situations containing many ambiguous, unpredictable, and often stressful elements” (Bandura & Schunk, 1981, p.587). Similarly, Zimmerman (1995) defined self-efficacy as a belief about what an individual can do rather than judgments about physical or personality characteristics. Moreover, Cantürk-Günhan and Başer (2007) mentioned that self-efficacy does not refer to observed skills of individuals; it refers to their beliefs about what they can do with these skills.

According to social cognitive theorists, individuals’ self-efficacy beliefs affect their choices, feelings, efforts to complete a task, motivation in learning, and anxiety levels (Işıksal & Aşkar, 2005; Klein, 2012). On the other hand, there are some factors which affect and form individuals’ self-efficacy beliefs such as experience, observation, and ideas of others (Bandura, 1997; Cantürk-Günhan & Başer, 2007). According to Bandura (1997), there are four sources affecting self-efficacy of individuals which are enactive mastery experience, vicarious experiences, verbal persuasion, and physiological and affective states.

Literature review showed that there are a lot of studies related to students’ self-efficacy beliefs and their achievement in different academic areas such as science and mathematics (Cantürk-Günhan & Başer, 2007; Işıksal & Aşkar, 2003). Results of many studies presented that self-efficacy can be considered as an important academic performance determinant (Pajares, 2002; Sakız, 2013). In this respect, self-efficacy of students in various areas is an important issue which needs to be investigated in detail. Since self-efficacy is a domain-specific and multidimensional construct (Pajares, 1996), in this study, a scale for pre-service middle school mathematics teachers’ self-efficacy about geometric constructions was aimed to develop.

Geometric construction is seen as one of main components of geometry and geometry education (Djoric & Janicic, 2004; Duval, 1998; Köse, Tanışlı, Erdoğan & Ada, 2012; Napitupulu, 2001; Stylianides & Stylianides, 2005). According to Duval (1998), there are three important cognitive processes in geometry, namely construction, visualization, and reasoning. Similarly, Usiskin (1987) accepted construction among fundamental dimensions of geometry. Geometric construction is a concept studied for thousands of years and an important branch of geometry since the ancient Greeks (Djorić & Janičić, 2004; Sarhangi, 2007; Stupel, Oxman & Sigler, 2014). Geometric construction can be described as a sequence of specific and primitive steps followed to form the intended geometric structure. By application of basic or primitive constructions, high level constructions such as construction of a regular hexagon might be achieved. At this point, it can be inferred that geometric constructions include both basic and complex constructions (Djoric & Janicic, 2004).

As mentioned, in addition to reasoning and visualization, construction is one of the main components of geometry (Duval, 1998; Usiskin, 1987). Since pre-service middle school mathematics teachers are mathematics teachers of future, they should be aware of the importance of geometric construction. Moreover, the scale in this study gives pre-service teachers chance to think about their capability of geometric construction and helps them to be aware of the importance of geometric construction. Besides, the number of studies related to geometric construction is limited (Erduran & Yeşildere, 2010; Köse, Tanışlı, Erdoğan & Ada, 2012). At this point, it can be stated that the number of the studies about geometric constructions in terms of affective factors is also limited in the accessible literature. Considering the importance of geometric constructions in geometry teaching and lack of the studies in geometric construction concept, this study was aimed to develop a scale assessing pre-service middle school mathematics teachers’ self-efficacy about geometric constructions. 

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