Educational system has a crucial effect on the development of communities and educational researches take important role in the improvement of educational systems in this context. According to the definition of Creswell (2005: 3), research is a process of steps including posing a question, collecting data, and presenting an answer to the question used to collect and analyze information in order to increase the understanding of a topic or issue. This description today has been converted into a more interpretive process based on observations, interviews, questionnaires, and even journals providing subjective conclusions about education and schooling (Gitlin et. al., 1999: 753-754). Thus, it can be said that educational research and schools are clearly related (Department of Education, Training and Youth Affairs, 2000) and knowledge base in educational research always leads the implementations in schools according to some researchers. (Goldstein, 2002; Beycioglu, Ozer, & Ugurlu, 2010). However, several studies related to this issue indicate that there is a gap between theory and practice in educational research. In order to overcome this situation, teachers having the key role in schools should be aware of the research findings provided by the academics.

In recent years, despite their limited numbers, there are several studies questioning and correlating teachers (Shkedi, 1998; Beycioglu, Ozer, & Ugurlu, 2010) or pre-service teachers (Gitlin et.al., 1999) and research engagement concepts together. Teacher education programs have been examined and tried to be developed in some of these studies. Therefore, our research provides to discuss about the content of teacher education programs and the pre-service teachers’ research engagement. The research enables us to have an idea about the profile of the pre-service teachers in Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart University related to become research-engaged teachers.

The research aims to determine pre-service teachers’ views on what research is, what are the properties of a research, and how often they read and will do it (and why and why not in each case) and what are the barriers to teacher candidate research engagement.

For this objective, the following questions were mainly addressed in this research:

1.      What is research according to pre-service teachers?

2.      What are the characteristics of ‘research’ according to pre-service teachers?

3.      What are pre-service teachers’ opinions related to teachers’ research engagement?

4.      To what extent do pre-service teachers say they read?

a. Where pre-service teachers do not read research, what reasons do they cite?

5.      To what extents do pre-service teachers say they will do research?

a. What are the reasons for engaging in research?

b. Where pre-service teachers will not do research, what reasons do they cite?

Borg, S. (2009). English language teachers’ conceptions of research. Applied Linguistics 30(3), 358-388. Creswell, J. W. (2005). Educational research: planning, conducting, and evaluating quantitative and qualitative research. New Jersey: Pearson Prentice Hall. Department of Education, Training and Youth Affairs (2000). The impact of educational research. Canberra, pp. 1-13. Gitlin, A., Barlow, L., Burbank, M. D., Kauchak, D., & Stevens, T. (1999). Pre-service teachers’ thinking on research: implications for inquiry oriented teacher education. Teaching and Teacher Education, 15, 753-769. Goldstein, S.L. (2002). Moving beyond collaboration: re-describing research relationships with classroom teachers. Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice, 8(2), 155-170. Shkedi, A. (1998). Teachers’ attitudes towards research: a challenge for qualitative researchers. Qualitative Studies in Education, 11(4), 559-577.