Examining social skills of high school students according to gender, school type and cognitive flexibility levels

In the age of information and technology, it is the ability to apply to the predictions and unusual situations that it is one of the basic elements that make people different from each other. This condition, which is defined as cognitive flexibility, is grounded in childhood and adolescence. Human being in a social region is understood as social, emotional and cognitive from the environment in which he lives. An important factor occurs. Cognitive flexibility levels may include social and social levels. One of the most important social environments for adolescents is their school. Different achievements and objectives are aimed with this practice in different kinds of schools teaching and learning practices. The impact of different achievements and objectives on the cognitive world of individuals raises curiosity. These conditions indicate whether there is a significant difference in social relationships with high school activities gender, school type and cognitive flexibility levels. The research was conducted on 419 secondary school students in 11th grade in Tarsus district of Mersin province in 2018-2019 academic year. In the study, Personal Information Form was used to determine the demographic characteristics (gender) of the students, and the Cognitive Flexibilty Scale developed by Martin and Rubin (1995) and later adapted to Turkish by Çelikkaleli (2014a) was used to measure cognitive flexibility. In order to measure social skill levels, Koydemir (2006), developed by Riggio in 1986 and adapted to Turkish by Yüksel (1997), was used the Social Skill Inventory, which was converted into a 30-item 90-item scale. In the analysis of the data, instead of testing the effect of two factors separately on an independent variable, two way variance analysis was used to test the main effects of the factors and the joint effect of the two factors on the dependent variable simultaneously. Gender, type of school, cognitive flexibility level were accepted as independent variable and social skills as dependent variable. According to the results of the study, it was found that there was no significant difference between gender and cognitive flexibility level and social skills. It was concluded that males with low cognitive flexibility had higher social skills than females, males with moderate cognitive flexibility had lower social skills than females, and males with high cognitive flexibility had higher social skills than females. It was found that cognitive flexibility and school type did not make a significant difference on social skills at the same time.