The effects of applying total quality principles on students' attitudes and their achievements in teaching process

This study was designed to understand the effects of total quality principles on students' achievements and their attitudes in teaching process. Li the research, among experimental research design procedures, "pre-test post-test control group design" method; was used. For the study, forty seven undergraduate students enrolled in the "Introduction to Teaching Profession" course were randomly selected from the Department of English Teacher Education at Gazi University, Gazi Faculty of Education during 2002 fall semester. Twenty four of forty seven students were assigned into the experiment group taught by total quality principles based instruction and twenty three of them were assigned in the control group trained by traditional instruction. In order to ascertain the effects of total quality principles based instruction on students' attitudes and their achievements, the data pertaining participants were collected by developing two instruments for application before and after the experience proceeding. The first scale was used to examine the students' attitudes toward understanding teacher practices in terms of total quality principles. The second one was applied to determine the students' achievements in the "Introduction to Teaching Profession" course. SPSS 10 (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences) was used to analyze the data. According to statistical results, standart deviation and total means of students' attitudes and their achivements were calculated. Additionally, paired samples t-test was used to determine whether there is a significant difference in post-test responses from the pre-test responses with regard to tiie student's attitudes and their achivements. Furthermore, to understand the meaningful differences between the groups independent-sample t test analysis was used and the following results were found ;1. According to pre-test results, in control group and experiment group, the students' attitudes toward understanding teacher practices in terms of total quality principles were relatively close to each other. There was no statistically significant difference between these two groups. However, in the post-test results, the experiment group students' attitudes showed higher degree comparing to the control group did. There was a significant difference between the control group and the experiment group in terms of students' attitudes toward understanding teacher practices about total quality principles. 2. In terms of the total quality principles; "students' satisfaction, continuous improvement, involvement, teamwork, communication, leadership and zero defect", in pre-test results, control group students' attitude scores decreased compare to post-test results. On the other hand, with regard to students' attitudes, there was a considerable increase between pre-test and post- test results of students taught by total quality based instruction. 3. According to pre-test results, control and experiment group students' achievement scores (respectively 45,54 and 42,29) were close to each other in the "Introduction to Teaching Profession" class. There was no significant difference between these groups considering mean of achievement scores. According to post-test results, control and experiment group students' achievement scores (respectively 74,89 and 80,93) increased compare to these two groups' pre-test scores. There was a statistically significant difference between the control group and the experiment group in terms of students' achievement scores. Experiment group students' achievement scores increased more than control group students' achievement scores in the post-test. 4. The difference between control group and experiment group students' pre-test and post-test achievement mean scores were 29,35 and 39,65 respectively. These scores led to significant difference in favor of experiment group.VI 5. Total quality principles based instruction positively influenced the experiment group students' attitudes and their achievements comparing to the control group students' without measurement and group discrimination.