Creating Intergenerational Space in Schools: A Scale Development Study

Year 2019, Volume: 5 Issue: 2, 1 - 10, 31.12.2019

Soner Polat , Gülşah Hiçyılmaz

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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