CONSIDERATIONS OF PRE-SERVICE GEOGRAPHY TEACHERS RELATED TO THE CONCEPT OF GEOGRAPHY

The purpose of this study was to reveal the considerations of pre-service geography teachers related to the concept of geography. For that purpose, word association test was performed to the study group including 46 pre-service teachers studying at geography final grade. So that, what pre-service teachers understood from the geography key concept addressed to them and which answer words this concept reminded to the students were tried to be revealed. Cognitive structure of the pre-service teachers on geography was determined evaluating obtained data. The study was carried out according to the qualitative research approach, and case study design was used. The data obtained from word association test were analyzed, and subjected to the content analysis. At the end of word association test analysis, answer words pre-service geography teachers gave for the “geography” key concept were coded, the same ones were grouped, and 6 different categories were created. The categories titled as physical geography, parts of geography, other sciences that the geography benefits from, and the relationship of geography and environments were revealed as the dominant categories. The different words that could not be included in one of the categories and the ones that were repeated once were separately mentioned in the text. Totally 146 answer words were created by the students for the geography key concept. The frequency of these words was determined to be 423. There were 120 words in 6 categories created from the answer words, and the number of repetition was 394. The number of the words in these categories that were repeated for twice and more was 68, and these were repeated for 342 times. The answer word that was repeated once in these 6 categories was calculated to be 52. And the number of words that were related to the concept but was not included in any categories was 26, and the frequency was 29. Furthermore, there were no answer words that were not related to the geography key concept