Investigation of the effect of life skills education guidebook on the development of professional knowledge regarding communication skills

Abstract

Gaining communication skills, one of the life skills included in the science curriculum, plays an essential role in reducing the conflicts that may occur in individuals’ communication. The fact that pre-service science teachers have professional knowledge about this skill is an indication that they can teach this skill to their students. Based on this idea, the current research aims to examine the effect of the life skills education guidebook on the development of pre-service science teachers’ professional knowledge of communication skills. The simple experimental method with a single group pretest-posttest design was employed in the research. The research sample consists of 83 pre-service science teachers studying at a state university in the 2019-2020 academic year. The communication skills professional recognition test was used as the data collection tool. The data obtained were evaluated within the framework of the determined keywords and subjected to descriptive analysis. The pretest-posttest scores of the pre-service science teachers were compared with the Wilcoxon signed-rank test. The test result shows that the life skills education guidebook positively affects the development of the third-grade pre-service science teacher’s professional knowledge about communication skills. The qualitative data obtained show that the professional knowledge of science teacher candidates regarding communication skills has increased from the level that needs to be developed to a weakly acceptable level. It has been revealed that the lack of prior professional knowledge of the pre-service teachers regarding communication skills makes it challenging to learn new professional knowledge.