Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
Education 3-13, cilt.46, sa.7, ss.802-813, 2018 (Scopus)
The purpose of the study was to investigate children’s epistemological beliefs in terms of their free play preferences in relation to learning centres. The study was conducted with 115 children coming from families with high socio-economic status (54 girls and 61 boys, 57 five years old and 58 six years old) during the 2015/2016 spring semester. The Epistemological Beliefs Scale for Children was administered to each child individually. In addition, all the children were shown pictures of science, drama, music, literacy, painting and mathematic centres prepared by two researchers and asked to choose the one they preferred for play during free time. Each child was interviewed by one researcher and each interview lasted approximately 15–20 minutes. According to the overall results of the study, children’s epistemological views tended to be dogmatic; however, some children thought more sceptically. Furthermore, children had a sophisticated thinking style in certain dimensions of knowledge while having immature reasoning in others. It was also found that the source of knowledge and hypothesising sub-dimensions of epistemological views indicated dogmatic thoughts. On the other hand, children had sceptical thoughts concerning the sub-dimension of change in knowledge.