Multivariate Analysis of School Principals' Technology Leadership Competencies, Learning School Envi...

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" Multivariate Analysis of School Principals' Technology Leadership Competencies, Learning School Environment and Schools' Social Network Structures "
Banoğlu, Köksal Çetin, Münevver Ölçüm

Document Type	:	Latin Dissertation
Language of Document	:	English
Record Number	:	1111663
Doc. No	:	TLpq2499374899
Main Entry	:	Banoğlu, Köksal
	:	Çetin, Münevver Ölçüm
Title & Author	:	Multivariate Analysis of School Principals' Technology Leadership Competencies, Learning School Environment and Schools' Social Network Structures\ Banoğlu, KöksalÇetin, Münevver Ölçüm
College	:	Marmara Universitesi (Turkey)
Date	:	2019
student score	:	2019
Degree	:	Ph.D.
Page No	:	211
Abstract	:	The introduction of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in education has profoundly changed the way education is delivered in schools. Next to pedagogical innovations arising from the integration of ICT into the repertoire of teaching strategies applied by teachers in classroom environments, a major sociocultural transformation has been undergone in the organisational environment of schools. In the present dissertation, we address this transformation from a multidimensional perspective in Turkish public K-12 schools. For this purpose, we examine the multiple relationships between school principal's technology leadership (TL) practices, schools' learning organisation (LO) culture, and professional interactions among school actors, including school principals, vice-principals, ICT coordinators, and subject-field/grade-level teachers. While doing so, we control for the availability of ICT-enriched infrastructure in Turkish schools as a structural factor as well as teacher and principal demographics associated with ICT integration. For another important structural factor, we address the quality of internal ICT support in Turkish schools by developing a research instrument that is able to measure Turkish ICT coordinators' professional self-efficacy levels. To clarify general connotations arising out of "sociocultural factors" and "structural factors"; school principals' TL practices are specified by the five standards of the International Society for Technology in Education for Administrators (ISTE-A) framework which is a well-known professional competency framework conducive to evaluate school principals' "visionary leadership", "digital-age learning culture", "excellence in professional practices", "systematic improvement", and "digital citizenship" standards. School’s LO culture is considered a proxy for a positive school culture that promotes teachers’ five professional learning orientations, which are "team learning", "shared vision", "systems thinking", "personal mastery", and "mental models" as suggested by the LO theory. Professional interactions are handled through technological and pedagogical advice-seeking relationships (ASRs) among school actors. While developing the research instrument, its items are constructed based on the performance indicators of the "National Competency Framework for ICT coordinators", which is an official report issued by Turkish Ministry of National Education. This PhD dissertation includes four empirical studies, which are all reported in separate chapters. The first explores the predictive ability of school's LO culture as perceived by teachers to TL practices performed by school principals. To this end, data were collected using principal and teacher surveys from 58 school principals and 1105 teachers. A twofold research design is undertaken with the collected data in order to answer two research questions: 1) In which profiles can school principals' TL practices be clustered?; and 2) To what extent are principals' demographic features, computer and internet usage, schools' existing LO culture and ICT infrastructure able to predict these TL profiles? For the first research question, latent class analysis (LCA) was employed to delineate school principals' TL practices within distinct sub-groups, i.e. latent profile structures. Each sub-group designates a TL profile whose members, i.e. school principals, reported similar features in relation to their self-report of performing ISTE-A standards. Our descriptive profile findings show reveal that nearly 55% of Turkish school principals are clustered under the high-level TL profile structure because they display greater self-report performance in overall TL practices; whereas 45% of those principals are classified into the low-level TL profile because of their relatively poor self-report performance. The most striking result emerging from the first study is that Turkish school principals are more likely to perform higher level TL practices if they manage an ICT-enriched school (Fatih school); use internet technology for a longer period of time a week, and manage a school in which teachers perceive a higher level of team learning professional learning orientation as part of school's LO culture. The second empirical study uses the same data collection as the first study. However, partly switching the dependent and independent variables of the first study, this study investigates the predictive ability of school principals' TL practices to schools' LO culture as perceived by teachers on average, after controlling for the effect of other variables, like teacher gender, age, teaching experience by years, and school's educational stages, i.e. primary, middle and secondary school stages. The following two research questions are addressed in this study: 1) What are the distinct profiles of LO culture endorsed by teachers?, 2) To what extent are school principals' TL practices, teacher gender, age, years of experience, and school stage able to predict the emergent LO profiles? As a result, teachers' professional learning orientations as a proxy for school's LO culture are statistically clustered in three level LO profiles. Based on mean perception scores obtained from each profile, they are named as high, moderate and low level LO profiles. In the second stage, the emerging three-level LO profiles are regressed on school principals' TL practices. The findings from the logistic regression analysis indicate that teachers are more likely to perceive the high-level LO profile in schools where school principals reported higher level of performing "systemic improvement" standard in their TL practices. Besides, this study indicates that elderly teachers, and middle-school teachers, i.e. teaching 11-14 years old students, are more likely to perceive the high-level LO profile, compared to the moderate-level LO profile. The third empirical study set out to develop a psychometric valid and reliable research instrument to assess Turkish ICT coordinators' professional self-efficacy. Specifically, this scale development study seeks to answer the following research question: Does the research instrument developed in this study yield an acceptable level of reliability and validity to measure ICT coordinators' professional self-efficacy? In answering this question, first, 53 draft items are generated by reviewing the "National Competency Framework for ICT Coordinators". Next, the content and face validity of these draft items was examined. For doing so, four scholars' expert opinion were asked about the draft items, who work in the Computer Instruction and Technology Education department of three Turkish universities. Based on their expert opinion, 8 items are excluded from the draft instrument. Later, the construct validity of the remaining items was verified by using sequentially principal component analysis (PCA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). As a result, this study demonstrates that a seven-component solution with 34 items accounts for 65.90% of the total variance. After one item is eliminated because of high value of standardized residual, CFA yields the final seven-component solution with 33 items. As a result, the developed measurement instrument appeared to be psychometrically sound for measuring Turkish ICT coordinators' professional self-efficacy levels. The emerging seven components were named in accordance with the seven competency fields described by TMONE (2008), such as'mastery of instructional design', 'using ICT-related concepts properly', 'measurement and evaluation tools','hardware and software equipment', 'multimedia applications', 'instructional software', and'safe and ethical ICT use'. As for test-retest procedure, the research instrument was administered to 67 pre-service ICT coordinators with two weeks interval. Test-retest reliability was used to confirm the developed instrument's time invariance. At last, the developed research instrument was administered to 53 in-service ICT coordinators. The results of variance analysis (t-test) revealed that female ICT coordinators had higher professional self-efficacy levels in 'instructional design', 'hardware and software mastery', 'measurement and evaluation', 'safe and ethical ICT use' competency fields than their male counterparts.
	:	The fourth empirical study addresses technological and pedagogical ASRs that teachers develop with other teachers, school principals, vice-principals etc. In its research design, individual (micro-level), relational (meso-level), and school-related (macro-level) factors are taken into consideration as they are able to influence ASRs among teachers. Afterwards, the interrelatedness of technological and pedagogical ASRs are compared between those schools with a high and low level LO culture. To this end, the fourth study is guided by two research questions: 1) To what extent do micro (i.e. gender, age, experience, departmental or administrative assignments), meso (interpersonal similarity of these features), and macro level factors (i.e. average teacher experience and perception of LO culture in schools) account for technological and pedagogical ASRs?; and 2) Which structural effects are associated with the relatedness of technological and pedagogical ASRs in distinct school contexts where teachers perceive high-level and low-level LO culture? The p2 and exponential random graph models (ERGMs) are two advanced social network analysis (SNA) approaches, which are separately used in this study to answer these two research questions. The results indicate that male teachers have more tendencies to provide pedagogical and technological ASRs to colleagues than their female counterparts. Teachers with the same gender, similar years of experience at the current school, and teaching the same subject-fields are more likely to contact each other for technological and pedagogical ASRs. This study also concludes that pedagogical ASRs are more likely to occur between administratively superior teachers and their subordinates. Furthermore, technological and pedagogical ASRs occur more reciprocally between teachers positioned within the same administrative rank (i.e. teacher-to-teacher, vice-principal-to-vice-principal). Contrastingly, these ASRs are more likely to become one-sided between teachers who teach different subject fields. Besides, the more the average age of teachers increases in a school, the less teachers engage in pedagogical ASRs with colleagues in that school. One of the most important findings show that teachers' perception of the high-level LO culture increase the likelihood of pedagogical ASRs among teachers. In other words, teachers are more likely to establish pedagogical ASRs in the schools where they perceived a higher level of LO culture on average. For the second research question, we compare the patterns of ASRs between two groups of schools with the high and low-level perceived LO culture. If a pattern of ASR proved to be significant in both groups, it means that this pattern is evident regardless of the LO culture. The results from the second research question reveals that, regardless of the perceived LO culture, teachers are more likely to seek technological advice from a colleague to whom they give pedagogical advice, and vice versa. This means that give-and-take type of ASRs are prevalent independently of the perceived LO culture in schools. On the other hand, in the schools endowed with the high-level LO culture, teachers are less likely to receive technological advice from colleagues with whom they exchange pedagogical advice in a reciprocal way. That is, this study discloses that LO culture appears to push the boundaries of conventional give-and-take exchanges by encouraging teachers to contact other colleagues for technological ASRs with whom they are not already in contact for pedagogical ASRs. Besides, teachers who are equally sought out for both technological and pedagogical ASRs are more likely to occupy a central position on advice networks in schools with the high-level LO culture. To put differently, the popularity of teachers who provide both technological and pedagogical ASRs to equal number of colleagues increases in schools where much more teachers perceive the high-level LO culture on average. The teachers who are asked for pedagogical advice by twice as many colleagues as technological advice are less likely to occupy a central position on advice networks in schools with the high-level LO culture. On the contrary, the teachers who are asked for technological advice by twice as many colleagues as pedagogical advice, so to say tech-savvy teachers, are more likely to occupy a central position in the advice networks, but irrespective of the perceived LO culture in schools. These findings, coupled with the previous findings, imply that LO culture appears to undermine the popularity (i.e. higher number of in-coming tie) of pedagogical advice givers, while technological advice-givers are already more popular than others to be sought out for ASRs in general. At last, this study reveals that the two teachers who are specifically sought out for technological advice by the same group of colleagues were more likely to give or receive, i.e. one-sided, pedagogical advice from each other in general. In other words, popular tech-savvy teachers are more likely to collaborate with each other, irrespective of the school's LO culture.
Subject	:	Datasets
	:	Educational psychology
	:	Learning
	:	School principals
	:	Social networks