THE EXAMINATION OF ECOLOGICAL AWARENESS IN TERMS OF RELATIONAL THINKING SKILL IN TEACHER CANDIDATES

This study examined participants' ecological awareness by predicting their relational thinking skills. The study was conducted on 127 teacher candidates in the Department of Science Teaching on a voluntary basis. It was designed as a case study using phenomenological method. A survey form comprising open-ended questions was used to collect data, and content analysis method was applied to analyse the data based on the process of information coding. The results of the study indicated that the teacher candidates could establish cause and effect relationships with regard to ecological relationships, displayed relational thinking skills and had high ecological awareness.