Coğrafya Bölümü Öğrencilerinin İstatistik Dersine Yönelik Tutumları: Türkiye ve Azerbaycan Örneği

Günümüzde pek çok alanda olduğu gibi coğrafyada da rakamsal ifadeler sıkça kullanılmaya başlanmıştır. Bu nedenle üniversitelerin coğrafya bölümlerinde öğrenim gören öğrencilerin de istatistik dersleri almalarıkaçınılmazdır. Coğrafya bölümlerinde istatistik dersi olmasına rağmen halen Türkiye’de coğrafya alanında eğitim görecek öğrenciler sosyal puan ile seçilmektedir. Dünyadaki pek çok ülkede ise coğrafya bölümlerine alınacak öğrencilerde matematik alanında başarıistenmektedir. Çalışmamızda Türkiye ile karşılaştırdığımız Azerbaycan da bu ülkelerden birisidir. Bu araştırmanın amacı, Azerbaycan’da ve Türkiye’de yükseköğretim coğrafya bölümü öğrencilerinin istatistik dersine yönelik tutumlarınıbelirlemek, okuduklarıokulun, cinsiyetin ve sınıf düzeyinin tutumlarına etkisini karşılaştırmalıolarak incelemektir. Araştırma, yükseköğretime coğrafya bölümlerinde devam eden Azerbaycan’da 90, Türkiye’de ise 570 öğrenci üzerinde gerçekleştirilmiştir. Bu araştırmada, veriler araştırmacılar tarafından geliştirilen İstatistik Dersine Yönelik Tutum Ölçeği ile toplanmıştır. Elde edilen bulgular, öğrencilerin İstatistik dersine yönelik tutumlarının genelde olumlu olduğunu, okunulan okul, cinsiyet, sınıf düzeyleri ve iki ülke açısından önemli farklar olduğunu ortaya koymuştur.

The statistics approaches of the contemporary world are being used in social, biological and natural sciences as well as in all branches of engineering. Plus, they are widely and increasingly being used in various applied studies. The students who choose to study geography at universities get the basic information about statistics either in Statistics or Research Methods courses. The high school educational processes of students, who will get geography training at college, vary in Turkey and Azerbaijan. The attitude which has a dominant sensual side affects the behaviors of a person towards his study. One of the most important student characteristics that is often studied related to the attitude towards Statistics Course is gender. Researches carried out abroad show a great connection between the gender and the attitude towards the Statistics Course in geography departments. However, in Turkey, there is no study about geography students’ attitudes towards the Statistics Course. The aim of this research is to show the students’ attitude towards Statistics Course in Turkey and Azerbaijan, to study the influence of the gender, university and the faculty they study in. Parallel to this objective, answers have been found for the questions below: 1. What is the students’ attitude towards the lesson? 2. Does this attitude vary in terms of gender? 3. Does this attitude vary in terms of the university? 4. Does this vary in terms of the faculty? This study is a scanning model research. The subjects of this research are the students of Geography Departments in Literature Faculties of Balıkesir and Ege University, Educational Faculties of Selçuk and Dokuz Eylül University in 2004-2005 Spring Term as well as the students in Baku State University Geography Department and Azerbaijan State Pedagogical University of Geography Training Department in Azerbaijan. During the research, data is gathered by using Statistics Attitude Scale SAS .As a result of the factor analysis which is done for the SAS, we can see that there are 4 items in the Scale. 6 items whose factor loading is below 0.40 and 2 items with negative item scale correlation have been removed from the scale. The Cronbach Alpha Reliability Coefficient of the scale has been calculated as 0.94. The sub-levels for the Reliability Coefficient are 0.94 for making effort, 0.91 for participation, 0.79 for the desire to work, 0.71 for the continuity of the study. With SSPS 15.0 programme, the data was used to calculate the arithmetical mean of the groups Turkey- 100,58, Azarbaijan99,49 and the Standard deviation Turkey-25, 20, Azarbaijan-6,96 . It is considered to be negative in terms of attitude if it is one Standard deviation less from the left of the calculated mean, positive if it is one Standard deviation bigger from the right and average attitude if it is between the two groups. To test if it was important to have differences between the arithmetical means of the groups, T test and One Way Variation Analysis was done. ”Scheffe Test” was applied to find out the difference in case the difference came out to be important as a result of the Variation Test. According to the analysis which was prepared to find out the attitudes of students towards Statistics Course, 16% out of 570 students is negative in attitudes, 13.9% positive and 70.2 % is on average. As for Azerbaijan, 16.7% out of 90 students is negative, 20% is positive and 63.3 % shows that their attitude is on average. To test if gender was an important factor for geography students’ attitude towards Statistics Course, both male and female students’ arithmetical mean and Standard deviations were calculated. Then, T test was applied to show if the differences between the means were important or not. As a result of the Variation Test, the difference between the attitudes towards the course on the levels of participation, the desire to work, continuity of the study came out to be important F 3,656 =2,63 . To examine the influence of the university on the geography students’ attitudes to the Statistics Course, arithmetical mean and Standard deviations were calculated by thinking of the attitude measurements of the universities they attended. To see if the difference was important, Variation Analysis were applied. The difference between the means on the levels of participation, the desire to work and continuity of the study came out to be important F 5,654 =2,23 . To examine the influence of the faculty on the geography students’ attitudes towards the Statistics Course, arithmetical mean and standard deviations were calculated by thinking of the attitude measurements of the faculties they attended. To see if the difference was important, Variation Analysis was applied. The difference between the means on the levels of participation, the desire to work and continuity of the study came out to be important F 3,656 =2,62 . According to the analysis that was done to show the attitudes of the students towards the Statistics Course, students in Azerbaijan are more positive than the students in Turkey. It is considered that this difference is caused by the rate of maths lessons’ to be more than other general lessons during Secondary School in Azerbaijan. To examine the influence of the university on the geography students’ attitudes towards the Statistics Course, attitude