Humans, as social beings, are in need of living, communicating and sharing their feelings and ideas with others and being included in a group during their lifetime and they structure their lives with the social skills they have during this process. Social skills of the individuals provide them with building positive relationships with the people around them, solving their problems in a way acceptable by the society, developing positive perceptions for themselves and people around, adapting to changes, and coping with difficulties and negativities. On the other hand, failure to find solutions for their problems or remaining of the efforts inconclusive may cause burnout feeling, weakness, difficulty in motivation and pessimism. Therefore, it is considered that it is of importance to research the effect of social skill levels of the teachers in the role of structuring the society and teacher candidates representing the future teachers on the perceptions for the future. From this point of view, this study aimed at examination on social skill levels and hopelessness levels of preschool teacher candidates, determining the factors that may be effective and revealing whether a relation exists between social skills and hopelessness levels. In line with this general aim, genders of preschool teacher candidates, grade level they continue, their place of living, and their residential place they have lived in for the most time till university will be independent variables of this study.

This study, in which relational screening model is used, will be carried out on first grade and fourth grade teacher candidates continuing their education at the Department of Early Childhood Education of Faculty of Education of a state university within 2013-2014 spring semester. In this study, “Social Skills Scale” developed by Riggio (1986) and adapted to Turkish by Yüksel (1997) will be used in determination of social skills of preschool teacher candidates and “Beck Hopelessness Scale” developed by Beck (1974)  and adapted to Turkish by Seber et al. (1993) will be used in determination of hopelessness levels. This study will research whether distribution of data meets the normality assumption in determination of social skills and hopelessness levels according to the variables of genders of preschool teacher candidates, grade level they continue, their place of living, and their residential place they have lived in for the most time till university in this study, and in this direction, it will be determined whether significant difference exists using parametric or non-parametric tests. The relation between social skills levels and hopelessness levels will be analyzed with correlation analysis techniques. In this line, the obtained results will be presented in tables and revealed by discussing with the related references.

Keywords: Preschool teacher, teacher candidate, social skill, hopelessness.