LEARNER-CENTRED PRINCIPLES ADOPTION SCALE: STUDY OF VALIDITY AND RELIABILITY

Abstract

Students come from different socio-economic backgrounds. Thus, they have different intelligence types, skills, competences,
emotional backgrounds, developmental stages, learning rates and styles. Therefore, the educational reform efforts going beyond
the “one size fits all” idea and addressing students’ individual differences have already become widespread. The learner-centred
principles, introduced as a result of long and comprehensive research, have all the elements influencing learning and the
characteristics of the learner-centred educational approach (APA, 1993; 1997). Although the transition to student-centeredness
in education methods and practices is gaining speed today, the beliefs and attitudes of the practitioners in the field determine
the effectiveness. Therefore, it is aimed to develop a valid and reliable measurement tool that can measure the degree to which
learner-centred principles are adopted by school administrators and teachers in the current study. In the light of the valid data
obtained from the participants, the instrument was examined within the framework of validity and reliability tests. For this, the
factor structure of the scale was analyzed by using exploratory factor analysis (EFA), and the structural equation modeling was tested with the confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). The factor structure of the scale, which was found to consist of 4 factors and 26 Likert type items, was found to be consistent with the structural equation model. In terms of internal consistency of the scale, Cronbach's Alpha internal consistency coefficient was found to be .88 and it was figured out that the scale had good internal consistency when examined with Spearman Brown's two half-sphere test correlation coefficients. It is believed that the results of the study will contribute to education circles, policy developers, practitioners and education managers as a resource or data collection tool in the development of student-centered education