The relationship between the physical conditions of school buildings and perceptions of organizational commitment of teachers in primary schools

The aim of this study is to determine the relationship between the physical conditions of school buildings and the perceptions of organizational commitment of teachers in primary schools. The research population consists of 2450 teachers from 92 primary schools in the central district of Diyarbakır in the academic year of 2017-2018. The data collection instrument was applied to randomly selected 534 teachers from 27 schools. "School Buildings Scale" was developed by Çağlayan and Yılmaz (2011) and "Organizational Commitment Scale" which was translated from English to Turkish by Dağlı, Elçiçek and Han (2017) were used in the study. "School Buildings Scale" consists of four dimensions and 45 items. These dimensions; "Separated Areas for Students", "Maintenance and Safety", "Teaching Fields", "General View". Organizational Commitment Scale is; Affective Commitment, Continuance Commitment, Normative Commitment. For analysis of the data; mean scores, standard deviations, Tukey Test percentile, frequency, t-test and ANOVA were used. The level of significance was 0.05. Some of the important findings were listed below: According to teachers' perceptions, the highest item that is associated with the school buildings is "to keep the school buildings in the garden" (X = 3.96; quite enough ); the item with the lowest level was found "classes for art education (music, painting, technology and design, ...) (X = 1,81; insufficient ); According to teachers' perceptions of physical conditions of school buildings, "fields reserved for students" (X = 2,44; insufficient ); "Care and Safety" (X= 3,26; Partially Sufficient). "Teaching Fields" (X = 2.77; Partially Sufficient) and "General View" (X = 3,58; quite enough) was found. For the whole scale, this average "(= 2.99)" Partially Sufficient "rate was determined. Among the teachers' perceptions of participation in the physical conditions of schools, there are only things like "care and protection", education status, marital status, seniority and school size, but a significant difference was found in all dimensions. Teachers participated in the total average of the organizational commitment scale at the level of "Undecided". According to the perceptions of teachers, the item with the highest average of organizational commitment is "I see this school's problems as my own problems" (X = 3,89). The lowest average item about organizational commitment according to teachers' perceptions is "I do not feel emotional attachment to this school" (X = 2.34; I do not participate). Averages of the perceptions of teachers participating in the survey on organizational commitment; "Affective Commitment" (X = 3,50), " Continuance Commitment " (= 3.14) and " Normative Commitment " (X = 2,94) and for the whole scale (= 3.19; Undecided) level was determined. There was a significant difference in all dimensions except for the dimension of "continuance commitment" according to the teachers' "perceptions of organizational commitment" according to gender, "Continuance commitment" according to their education status and in all dimensions except "normative commitment" according to the size of the school they were working in. According to marital status and seniority, teachers' perceptions do not differ significantly in any dimension. Generally, it was found that there was a moderate and positive relationship between the school building scale and organizational commitment scale (r =,561, p <0.01). Keywords: School buildings, physical conditions of school buildings, organizational commitment.