EXPLORING PRE-SERVICE TEACHERS' BELIEFS TOWARDS THE USE OF SOCIAL MEDIA IN EDUCATION

Social media is a recent phenomenon being integrated into education, so educational practice should be informed by the research conducted on social media beliefs of pre-service teachers. In order to meet this need in research, teacher candidates' beliefs towards the use of social media in education should be explored. In line with this underlying reason, the purpose of this study was to develop a valid and reliable scale that measures the beliefs of pre-service teachers towards the use of social media in education. For this purpose, data of a survey consisting 27 belief items on a five-point Likert agreement scale were collected from a total number of 275 undergraduate students in Computer Education and Instructional Technology department of Yildiz Technical University. An Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) was performed by principal axis factoring with oblique rotation. All prior analyses including assumptions were tested before EFA. As result two factors were extracted. Factor loadings were acceptable and items were significantly correlated to each other. Two distinguishable and parsimonious factors were named as "positive reflections" and "negative reflections". Respectively Cronbach alpha coefficients were .92 and .83. In order to validate the scale, a larger sample size with students from different faculty of education departments was recommended. The constructed belief scale may be used as an effective tool by instructors in universities' education fields to explore pre-service teachers' beliefs towards the use of social media in education.