Investigation of Pre-Service Science Teachers’ Attitudes towards Genetics Applications with respect to Different Variables

The study aims to investigate the pre-service science teachers’ attitudes towards genetic applications in terms of various variables. The participants of the study constitute of 298 pre-service science teachers who are studying in elementary science education program at two public universities in the Aegean Region during the 2016-2017 spring semester. Demographic information scale and Attitudes towards issues in Genetics Literacy Scale which was translated and adapted into Turkish by Cebesoy (2014) were used as data collection tools. The descriptive statistics indicated that the general attitudes of the pre-service teachers towards genetic applications (M=2.92), and their attitudes toward using genetic information (M=3.27) were generally unstable. On the other hand, they indicated that some specific genetics applications (i.e abortion, pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, gene therapy and gene therapy applications) should be allowed in some cases. Canonical Correlation analysis revealed that the proposed model is statistically significant (p <.001). According to the model, there were positive relationships among grade level and self-perceived interest in genetics applications (SET 1) and general attitudes towards genetic applications and gene therapy applications; wheras the relationship between abortion and Pre-Implantation genetic diagnosis were negative