The Development of a Scale to Determine General Competency for Primary School Teachers in Turkey: A Validity and Reliability Study

Teachers who are responsible for educating individuals in such an important stage must have the attitudes and behaviours required by the profession. Qualified teachers will lead to better-behaved, trained, and qualified students. The skill of creating a qualified teaching-learning process is directly related to teachers' competencies and knowledge. The aim of this study is to determine at what level teachers working in Turkey have general teacher competencies. The population of this research consists of 450 primary school teachers working in the central district in Ankara during the 2013 - 2014 academic year. During development of this scale, exploratory factor analysis, two half reliability analyses, item-total correlation, Cronbach's alpha, and confirmatory factor analysis were used. Consequently, it is possible to say that this scale, with 60 items and five factors, is a reliable and valid scale to investigate primary school teachers' competencies.