The purpose of this study was to assess the overall job satisfaction and the curriculum satisfaction of the teachers teaching Mathematics, Turkish, Social Studies, Natural Sciences, and Foreign Language at 6-8 grades of public elementary schools. A questionnaire developed by the researcher was used as the data collection instrument of this study. All the teachers working at the 6-8 grades of the public elementary schools in Turkey and teaching Mathematics, Turkish, Social Studies, Natural Sciences, and Foreign Language constituted the population of the study. The total number of the teachers who constituted the sample was 720. The data gathered was analyzed by SPSS program / descriptive statistics, independent sample t-test, and one-way ANOVA. The results showed that the teachers were satisfied in terms of overall job satisfaction, however, quite undecided in terms of curriculum satisfaction. According to the results of the study, there was a significant difference between the teachers&rsquo / overall job satisfaction in terms of age, marital status, educational background, work experience, lesson load, and motive for choosing teaching profession, but no difference in terms of their gender, number of courses taught, and teaching subject. The results also showed that there was a significant difference between the teachers&rsquo / curriculum satisfaction in terms of teaching subject. When the teachers&rsquo / choice for a new career was considered, there was a significant difference between the teachers&rsquo / overall job satisfaction and between their curriculum satisfaction.

The aim of this study is to examine the role of teacher as agent for change in the school environment after the provision of in-service teacher training. Ministry of Education provides in-service teacher training in collaboration with the International English Language Education Association (INGED- Turkish acronym- for short) in order to keep English language teachers up to date and adapt to the changing nature of the modern world. To what extent in-service teacher training enables teachers perform as leaders, whether they act as agents for change and more importantly whether teachers contribute to school improvement are the areas that this study conducts a research on. Qualitative research method was employed in this study. Data were collected through interviews in two phases in the city of &Ccedil / anakkale. Phase 1 took place during the Ministry of National Education in-service teacher training seminar, Phase 2 was after six months of the seminar. Sample in the first phase was v made up of 19 course participants, in the second phase the sample contained both 19 course participants and their 38 peers and 10 principals. Findings revealed that some teachers who work in a more democratic school environment were enabled with their change agentry roles as their principals created a flexible institutional culture. However, teachers who work in more rigid and centralized work environment were not given the freedom for applying the ideas that they were encouraged through in-service teacher training. This shows that on the one hand even one shot in-service teacher education contributes to teacher development in building change agents by raising teacher awareness on her subject knowledge and role but on the other hand to practice leadership and change agent role very much depends on the school culture.

There were two aims of the study. First one was to validate a truck simulator designed to train truck drivers on economic fuel consumption. Second one was to develop a simulator validation model for instructional simulators. This aim merged as a result of literature review since there is a controversy on the categorization and application of validation approaches. To accomplish two aims, the simulator validation approaches were categorized according to their descriptions in the literature, namely, &ldquo / Behavioral&rdquo / , &ldquo / Face&rdquo / and &ldquo / Instructional&rdquo / validation and combined in the current study. Blending Mixed Methods Research Design and Designed Case Formative Research Design were employed together in order collect data. To validate the simulator and investigate the main characteristics of instructional validation process, 110 truck drivers from a logistics and transportation company participated to the economic fuel consumption training. The data were collected in two parts as during the training and 5 months after the training. Both quantitative and qualitative research approaches were used to collect data. To analyze the qualitative data, open coding analysis method were employed and quantitative data were analyzed using SPSS statistics software. According to the study results, although the Truck Simulator did not represent the real model in 100% percent or had some usability problems, it was valid in overall since it did what it was supposed to do during the training. Also, the results of the study showed that the validation determination should have been done according to the instructional goals / not the reality or usability of it.