The investigation of the relationship between tendency towards change and the problem solving skills of high schools aministrators (Keçiören case)

The aim of this study was to determine the relationship between the tendency towards change and the problem solving skills of the school administrators of public and private high schools. The research was carried out by a quantitative method. In this study, relational descriptive statistics model was applied. The sample of this study consisted of 101 administrators working in state high schools and private high schools of Keçiören district national education directorate. The majority of the participants are assistant principals. When the distribution of the study group by age is considered, it is seen that the majority is 40 years of age and over, the majority of the school administrators have graduated from the faculties of education at the undergraduate level, and that one fifth of the administrators are graduate. When we look at the branches, it was seen that the participants were more than mathematics and science. In addition, administrators were found to be senior and 20 years old and above. The data of this study is collected using by personal information form including the demographic characteristics of the administrators who work in high schools, the Turkish translation of the scale developed by Heppner and Peterson (1982), Problem Solving Inventory adopted by Şahin, Şahin and Heppner (1993) and change tendencies scale developed by Akbaba-Altun and Büyüköztürk (2011). Data were analyzed with IBM SPSS Statistics 23 program. Frequency distributions for categorical variables, minimum value for numerical variables, highest value, median, mean and standard deviation are given. While analyzing the data, parametric methods were used to test the numerical variables that provide the assumption of normal distribution. Non-parametric tests were applied to test the numerical variables that did not provide the normal distribution assumption. The difference between the two independent groups was examined by using the non-parametric test and the non-parametric tests with the Mann Whitney U test. The difference between the two independent groups was examined by one way variance analysis from the parametric tests and the non-parametric tests by Kruskal Wallis test. Spearman correlation coefficient was used to investigate the relationship between two numerical variables. The results obtained from the research findings are as follows: Considering the change tendencies of school administrators, it is seen that they get the highest score in the resistance to change change sub-dimension. In addition, it was seen that there was a significant difference in terms of level of tendency of change between tasks of school administrators, while there was no significant difference in terms of sub-dimensions. In the study, it was seen that the change tendencies of the school administrators were significantly higher than the deputy principals. However, there were no statistically significant differences between the school administrators' tendency to change in terms of age, gender, branch, last school, vocational seniority, professional seniorty, seniority and the number of seminars / courses they attended. There was a statistically significant difference in the problem solving ability confidence and approach avoidance subscale. As the problem solving level was inversely proportional to scoring, the results were high in favor of the administrators in the 21-40 age range. However, there were no significant differences in the problem solving levels of the school administrators in terms of gender, branch, final school, vocational seniority, professional seniorty, seniority and the number of seminars / courses they attended. There is a statistically significant negative relationship between the problem solving inventory and the sub-dimensions and the trend of change trends and the sub-dimensions of the change (three) according to the results of the analysis. However, no significant relationship was found between the problem solving inventory and the sub-dimensions, and the sub-dimension of belief in the benefit of change, but no statistically significant relationship was found between the approach avoidance and change tendency scale.