Adapting Historical Perspective Taking Instrument into Turkish and Investigating History and Social Studies Student Teachers’ Historical Perspective Taking Skills

This study aims to adapt historical perspective taking (HPT) instrument into Turkish and then to examine history and social studies student teachers’ HPT skills. Adapting a cross-sectional survey model the current study employs 386 history and social studies student teacher attending to related educational programmes at Gazi, Necmettin Erbakan and Uşak universities in the spring term of 2017-2018 academic year. The study sample was chosen in accordance with random sampling technique. In order to test the structural validity of the HPT Instrument confimatory factor analyses were conducted. Besides, descriptive statistics, t-tests, Brown-Forsythe ve Welch Statistics and One-way Anova were conducted. The research findings reveal that the Turkish version of the HPT instrument is valid and reliable which has a coherent and compatible structure with its original version. The findings also indicate that although there are some differences amongst the groups in regard with several variables, students teachers have sufficient HPT skills. Bearing on this result, the current study discusses the place and importance of measuring HPT skills within the Turkish context.