An Investigation on Primary School Teachers’ Perceptions of Effective Citizenship Proficiency byCertain Variables

Citizenship can be defined as political belonging to the state. Citizenship consists of relationships between the state and the individuals. In order to maintain the relationships between the state and the citizens wholesomely, it is necessary to fulfill rights and responsibilities mutually. Thanks...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Halil İbrahim SAĞLAM
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Journal of Social Studies Education Research 2012-11-01
Series:Journal of Social Studies Education Research
Subjects:
Online Access:https://www.jsser.org/index.php/jsser/article/view/140
Description
Summary:Citizenship can be defined as political belonging to the state. Citizenship consists of relationships between the state and the individuals. In order to maintain the relationships between the state and the citizens wholesomely, it is necessary to fulfill rights and responsibilities mutually. Thanks to this fact, citizenship education has become common interest of whole humanity. In this sense; primary education is a crucial step in developing citizenship consciousness. The fact that students in this level are proned to pattern themselves after their teacher and that teacher are perceived as professionalists followed by society further increase the significance of effective citizenship proficiency levels of teachers. Consequently, determining effective citizenship proficiency levels of the teachers who work in primary education constitutes the main purpose of this study. In addition, it is aimed to determine whether the teachers’ gender, field of study, marital status, length of service, whether they prefer teaching profession willingfully and whether they are pleased with teachership or not lead to differentiation in their “effective proficiency levels”.The purpose of this study is to reveal primary school teachers’ effective citizenship proficiencies. The study employed a 23-item inventory of effective citizenship proficiencies, which consisted of two sub-dimensions, namely “citizenship values” and “citizenship knowledge and skills”. The inner consistency coefficient of the inventory is 0.89. The study was conducted on a total of 214 teachers, 108 of them being female (50.5%) and the remaining 106 of them (49.5%) being male, during the Spring Term of the Educational Year 2010-2011. The level of significance for data analysis was accepted as 0.50. The data were analyzed in accordance with the sub-dimensions. Firstly, the normality of the distribution of the variables was studied through the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test in an attempt to determine what kind of tests would be conducted on the data. According to the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test, it was concluded that the distributions were not normal, for there were significant differences, at the level “p<0.05”, in the variables “marital status”, “length of service”, “willingly or unwillingly choosing to become a teacher” and “being satisfied or dissatisfied with being a teacher”. Accordingly, the Kruskal Wallis H test, a non-parametric method, was conducted on the variable “length of service” whereas the Mann-Whitney U test was carried out on the variables “marital status”, “willingly or unwillingly choosing to become a teacher” and “being satisfied or dissatisfied with being a teacher”. Furthermore, the Mann-Whitney U test was conducted in order to determine between which groups the significant differences, revealed by the Kruskal-Wallis H test, existed. The t test, a statistical parametric method, was carried out on the data on the variables “gender” and “branch”. The study concluded that primary school teachers “strongly agree” with the statements on efficient citizenship proficiencies. There was no significant difference between teachers in “gender”, “branch”, “marital status”, “willingly or unwillingly choosing to become a teacher” and “being satisfied or dissatisfied with being a teacher”. However, the study reported a significant difference in favor of those teachers with a higher length of service in both the whole inventory and the sub-dimension “citizenship knowledge and skills”
ISSN:1309-9108