Developing an Instrument for Determining Subject-Oriented World Views of Prospective Science Teachers

The purpose of this study is to develop a reliable and valid instrument for determining worldviews towards astrobiology subjects of prospective science teachers. With this purpose, an instrument called as "Inventory of Worldview related to Astrobiology Subjects (IWAS)" was developed by the researchers. The validity and reliability studies of the instrument was conducted with 192 prospective teachers studying in Science Education Department. The validity studies was conducted with the experts from the different fields. According to the expert opinions, "temperature", "water" an "oxygen" was determined as themes in the instrument and then five different worldview as "Anthropocentric", "Ecocentric", "Earth Centric, "Teleological" and "Essentialist" were included in each item placed under these themes. For the construct validity of the instrument, the correlations between items and between each item and total score was examined and it was observed that the instrument has single dimensional structure in terms of investigated variable. Test-retest method was used for the reliability and it was seen that the instrument has consistency for determining worldviews toward astrobiology of prospective science teachers. As a result, in the descriptive analyses performed with the reliable and valid instrument, it was observed that the prospective science teachers' worldview on astrobiology subjects were dominated by the ecocentric worldview.