Creating Intergenerational Space in Schools: A Scale Development Study

Abstract

Today's organizations require individuals from different age groups to work together due to factors such as the continuation of work by older individuals and the recruitment of young individuals. At the same time organizations, due to the developing technology and increasing competition conditions, are forced to become an organization that renews itself, follows the developments, produces new unique information, in short, learns. One of the ways to become a learning organization is through intergenerational learning. Intergenerational learning is the ability of employees of different generations to apply what they learn from each other. The most important step of this is to create spaces for teachers from different generations to come together. This study was conducted with the aim of developing a reliable and valid scale to identify the spaces where teachers from different generations coexist. In this context, considering the data of the relevant literature and interviews with teachers, a pool of 45 items was created. Expert opinions were taken to ensure scope validity and two items were revised. This scale form was applied to 90 primary school teachers working in Derince district of Kocaeli province in the spring term of 2018 - 2019 academic year. All of the scales were returned and 12 were excluded from the evaluation due to errors in the coding. Research data were obtained from 78 teachers. For the validity studies of the scale, exploratory and confirmatory factor analyzes were performed. According to exploratory factor analysis, the scale consists of four sub-dimensions and 25 items: socio-cultural activities, intergenerational sensitivity, educational meetings and educational activities. The total item correlations in the scale were between 0.571 and factor loads between 0, 420 and 0, 834. It explained 72.59 of the total variance. After the exploratory factor analysis, the fit indices of the scale were found to be sufficient and the four-dimensional structure was confirmed according to the confirmatory factor analysis (X²/df=1,809, RMSEA=,103 SRMR=,764 TLI=,852 CFI=,871 GFI=,706). The reliability of the scale was examined by Cronbach’s Alpha internal consistency coefficient. As a result of the reliability analysis, the internal consistency coefficient was α = .96. The results of the study showed that Intergenerational Space Scale is a valid and reliable measurement tool with sufficient psychometric properties. The intergenerational space scale can be used in research on bringing together teachers from different generations in schools.

Keywords

• Intergenerational Space,Scale Development,teacher

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