A Scale Development Study to Determine Primary School Teachers' Tendencies to Direct Students to Critical Thinking

Abstract

The goal of this study was to create a measurement tool to determine primary school teachers' tendency to direct students to critical thinking. Based on this purpose, first of all, the literature on the subject was scanned and the opinions of teachers were consulted. At the end of this process, an item pool consisting of 55 items was created. The scale items in the item pool were submitted to expert opinion for content validity. The items, which were arranged in line with the opinions of the experts, were transformed into a scale form with a five-point Likert-style option scale. The scale was applied to 500 primary school teachers working in the primary schools of the Ministry of National Education in Altındağ and Mamak, which are the central districts of Ankara, in the 2020-2021 academic year. Since EFA and CFA were planned in the research, the study group was divided into two. Accordingly, it was carried out on the data of EFA study group 1 and CFA study group 2. Study group (1) consists of 250 persons, and study group (2) consists of 250 persons. As a result of the exploratory factor analysis (EFA) applied for construct validity, it was observed that the scale had a one-dimensional structure consisting of 51 items. The total amount of variance explained by the single factor structure is 41,596%. The results of the independent samples t-test, which were used to determine the distinctiveness of each item on the scale, were significant (p≤.01). On the other hand, it was observed that the confirmatory factor analysis values of the scale were in accordance with the reference values accepted as criterion values for model data fit. The scale's Cronbach alpha reliability coefficient was found to be .97. It can be said that the results of the validity and reliability analysis obtained prove that the scale has the necessary psychometric properties.