New Perspectives in Science Education

In the renewed middle school science teaching program in 2013, the entrepreneurship concept was placed and it was aimed to gain the characteristics which comprised by this concept to students in Turkey. Therefore, at first there can be said that the pre-service teachers who are getting ready for the teaching profession need to be accounted with entrepreneurship concept and have the characteristics comprised by this concept. In this research, it was aimed to investigate the effects of entrepreneurship education on entrepreneurship characteristics (risk taking, seeing the opportunities, being innovative, self-confidence, and emotional intelligence) of pre-service science teachers. The research was realized in 2013-2014 education years during a selective course with the participation of 26 third grade pre-service science teachers. The mixed design was adopted in the research. The qualitative dimension of the research was designed as phenomenological study while simple experimental method was preferred for the quantitative dimension. The data was obtained through “Entrepreneurship Scale” and semi-constructed interviews. The descriptive analysis was preferred in order to present the data obtained through interview while Wilcoxon Signed Rank Test was used for the data obtained before and after experimental implementation. As a result of the research, it was seen that entrepreneurship education had statistically significant positive effect on risk taking, seeing the opportunities, being innovative, and emotional intelligence characteristics of pre-service science teachers, at the same time it was determined through the qualitative methods that it has a positive effect. However there was any statistically significant difference in terms of self-confidence characteristics, it was seen that they noticed the improvement at their self-confidence at the interviews performed with the participants. According to this results, there can be suggested that entrepreneurship education should be placed in science teacher education and experimental researches should be conducted for other entrepreneurial characteristics.