Pre-Service Primary School Teachers' Attitudes Toward an Online Literacy Methods Course

Abstract

This study examined pre-service primary school teachers’ attitudes toward an online literacy methods course and whether these attitudes differed according to learning preferences, course grade, gender, and grade level. Understanding these differences is relevant to the design of practice-oriented online teacher education courses, where students engage with both theoretical content and applied learning activities. A cross-sectional quantitative study included 139 pre-service teachers enrolled in a primary education program in Ankara, Türkiye. Data were collected using the Visual, Aural, Read/Write, and Kinesthetic (VARK) Learning Styles Inventory and the Attitude Scale Toward the Teaching of Primary Reading and Writing Course. Because attitude scores were non-normally distributed, Kruskal–Wallis H and Mann–Whitney U tests were used. Most participants (71.9%) reported multimodal learning preferences, and the four-modality VARK profile was the most common (39.6%). Overall attitudes toward the course were positive (M = 4.34, SD = 0.50), although Interest was lower than Willingness and Necessity. Comparisons across 13 VARK profiles produced significant omnibus differences in Interest and Necessity but corrected pairwise comparisons indicated that these results were largely influenced by one group of three participants. No significant differences were found when profiles were regrouped by the number of preferred modalities. Attitudes differed by course grade and grade level, with small to moderate effect sizes, but not by gender. Overall, the findings indicate that course attitudes in this sample were more consistently associated with course grade and grade level than with VARK preference profiles, while also documenting substantial diversity in pre-service teachers’ learning preferences.