Examination of the Relationship between School Administrators’ Lifelong Learning Tendencies and Individual Innovativeness Levels

Abstract

This study aims to investigate school administrators’ tendencies towards lifelong learning and their individual innovativeness levels by using different variables, as well as to determine the relationship between these tendencies and levels. The research was conducted using a correlational survey model, one of the quantitative methods. The universe of this study consisted of 1308 school administrators working in Sakarya province. The sample includes 302 school administrators who were randomly selected from this universe and volunteered to participate. Data collection involved the use of a “Personal Information Form”, the “Lifelong Learning Tendencies Scale”, and the “Individual Innovativeness Scale”. Data analyses were conducted using the SPSS 24.0 software package. Descriptive statistics were used to calculate the scores obtained by school administrators from the scales to analyze the sub-problems of the research. The Kolmogorov-Smirnov and Shapiro-Wilk normality tests, along with the Mann-Whitney U and Kruskal-Wallis H tests, were used for comparison analyses, whereas the Spearman rank-order correlation coefficient was examined for the relationship analysis. Given the results achieved research results, a positive and moderately significant relationship was found between school administrators’ lifelong learning tendencies and their individual innovativeness levels. It was concluded that there is no significant difference in school administrators’ lifelong learning tendencies and individual innovativeness levels by gender and administrative experience variables. However, it was found that school administrators’ lifelong learning tendencies show a significant difference in favor of those pursuing postgraduate education by the education level variable, whereas their individual innovativeness levels do not show a significant difference.

Keywords

• Individual innovativeness
• lifelong learning
• school administrators

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