Preservice teachers? metaphors about university teacher and metaphor as an evaluation tool

The aim of this study is to reveal preservice teachers’ metaphors about the lecturers at university. Study group of the research consists of 347 preservice teachers enrolled at three different education faculties in Turkey in 2011-2012 academic year. Data was obtained from the preservice teachers completion of the sentences such as “University teacher is like ..., because ...”. For analysing the data quantitative and qualitative research methods were used. As a result, 183 metaphors were determined about University teachers in 16 conceptual categories. The categories which produced metaphors most about the University teachers are as follows; university teachers as the source and passer one of the knowledge (42 metaphors), the university teacher as a guide one (38 metaphors), the university teacher as a changing one (24 metaphors), the university teacher as a scary-repelling one (21 metaphors), the university teacher as a versatile one (17 metaphors) respectively. Besides, the metaphors can be used as an evaluation tool for determining the performance of a university teacher at studies of increasing quality in higher education