Teachers’ perception: Competent or not in curriculum development

Abstract

The purpose of the study is to determine teachers’ perceptions on curriculum development competencies and determine whether their perceptions differ according to gender, branches, seniority and graduated faculty type. The study consist of two parts: One part is the improvement of curriculum development competency scale with the participation of 350 teachers in Turkey; the other is the determination of teachers’ perceptions on curriculum development competencies with the participation of 472 teachers in Turkey. The validity of the scale is provided with exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis. The analysis results indicate the scale with 37 items has a single factor and the Cronbach Alpha coefficient parameter is calculated as .945. Descriptive statistics are examined to determining the teachers' perceptions on their curriculum development competencies. Mann Whitney U test and Kruskal Wallis H test are used to determine whether the teachers’ perceptions on curriculum development competencies differ according to gender, branch, seniority and graduated faculty type. As a result, teachers often perceive themselves incompetent on curriculum development and their perceptions only differ as regards branch.