High-quality preschool education produces substantial long-term educational, social, and economic benefits, but large benefits occur only when teachers are professionally prepared and adequately compensated. Qualifying the teacher candidates depends on many interrelated components of a teacher education. The aim of this study is to evaluate the student selection policy, decision-making policy, recruitment policy, teacher candidates&rsquo / educational profiles, faculty development and assignment policy, curriculum and instruction, and the graduates&rsquo / competences from the perspectives of the faculty members in the preschool teacher education program. For this purpose, decision-oriented program evaluation CIPP model is taken as a framework. In order to reach in-depth and detailed information from the participants, study is designed as a qualitative phenomenological research. Participants are selected through purposeful sampling strategies that include criterion sampling and snowball sampling procedures from the population of 150 academicians in the 55 preschool teacher education program
in Turkey. Data is collected through semi-structured interviews and open-ended questionnaires from 58 participants. According to the content analysis, findings
indicated that there is need for the additional tests in the student selection, improvement in the faculty development policy, accreditation, faculty initiative in curriculum planning and implementing, alternative strategies in practicum, and collaboration of the local authorities and the faculties in the recruitment policy of the graduates. In this respect, it is believed that the findings will pave the way for the program developers to reform the program accordingly, will give further
insights about the real experiences of the academicians and take their suggestions to improve the program and will help the researchers to raise some new questions about the preschool teacher education program to investigate.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:METU/oai:etd.lib.metu.edu.tr:http://etd.lib.metu.edu.tr/upload/12615087/index.pdf |
| Date | 01 October 2012 |
| Creators | Tekmen, Belkis |
| Contributors | Akar, Hanife Doc.dr. |
| Publisher | METU |
| Source Sets | Middle East Technical Univ. |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Ph.D. Thesis |
| Format | text/pdf |
| Rights | To liberate the content for METU campus |
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