A Study on Developing Scale for Teacher Perceptions towards Spelling Rules

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to develop a scale to determine Primary Education and Turkish Language teachers' perceptions regarding the frequency of spelling mistakes which their students make. Therefore, this experimental form made to serve this goal was presented to field specialists in terms of consultation; and each item in the form was regulated to ensure content validity rates in accordance with the feedback provided by the specialists. Items with the validity rate below 0.80 were omitted from the form. The trial form consisting of 34 items was administered to 232 Primary Education and Turkish Language teachers who teach at schools under the jurisdiction of Ministry of National Education (MoNE) via e-mail, and the gathered data were analyzed. With the help of Exploratory Factor Analyses (EFA), a four-dimensioned construct with 19 items including frequently made mistakes regarding acronyms, spelling of conjunctions and suffixes, spelling of capital letters, spelling of compound words, and the spelling of the words affected by word formation processes. In the analyses, the relations between the sub-scales of the original scale were taken into consideration, revealing that factors had positive and significant relationships and sub-dimensions were the constituents of the general structure named spelling mistakes, which made up the upper structure. Goodness of fit indices (GFI) of the model was detected to be quite high. Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) administered to the second research group justified the EFA results. The internal consistency coefficient, calculated as .91, for the entire scale was found to be quite reliable.