The investigation of empathic skill levels of classroom teachers in terms of socio demographic variables and discipline techniques they prefer

The purpose of this study is to examine the empathic skill levels of classroom teachers in terms of some socio demographic variables and discipline techniques they prefer.For that purpose, a total of 473 classroom teachers working in 40 primary schools in the central districts of Adana (Seyhan, Çukurova, Yüreğir, Sarıçam) in 2010?2011 academic years participated in the study. The data was obtained by the use of ?Empathic Skill Scale-B Form (ESS-B), ?Discipline Types Scale? and ?Information Form?.According to the study findings, the empathic skill scores of classroom teachers do not differ significantly in terms of gender, marital status and whether they had communication skills course before. However, among ?25-35?, ?36-45? and ?46-60? age groups, it differs significantly in favor of the ones in ?25-35? and ?36-45? age groups, and between graduates and associates, similarly it differs significantly in favor of the graduates; among the teachers who prefer their profession and who don?t prefer, it?s in favor of the ones who do not prefer their profession; and lastly among the teachers who work at schools with high socio economic status and schools with low socio economic status, it differs significantly in favor of the ones who work at schools with low socio economic status. Additionally, between the empathic skill scores of teachers and Discipline Types Scale sub dimensions, a low negative and meaningful relation is found. At the end of dual logistic regression analysis for determining to what extent independent variable predicts the empathic skill levels of teachers, only ?age? variable is found to predict high empathic skill level in a negative and significant way.Key Words: Empathetic Skill, Classroom Management and Discipline Techniques, Classroom Teacher