DEVELOPMENT OF MOTIVATION SCALE TOWARD THE ELECTIVE KORAN COURSE (MSEKC) AND ITS ANALYSIS ACCORDING TO DIFFERENT VARIABLES

Abstract

Motivation can be defined as the underlying mechanism of the individual's behavior. In terms of education, there are two types of motivation: internal motivation, external motivation. The high motivation of the students toward the course is an important factor in achieving the aims of that course. This is also valid for the elective Koran (EK) course.

EK course has been added as an elective course to the curriculum of the secondary schools and high schools in 2012. In other words, EK courses have been taught in schools for about eight years. In this process, various researches have been done on EK in Turkey. In these studies, the reasons of students for choosing the course, the opinions and attitudes of teachers, and students toward the course were discussed. However, no research on the motivation toward the EK course has been done yet. In this context, the problem statement of the research was determined as "To develop a scale in order to determine the motivation of high school students towards EK course and to examine it in terms of various variables".

The research was done in 3 steps. These steps were designed according to an exploratory sequential design, which is one of the mixed-method research approaches. Study groups were created according to these steps. The common feature of all study groups is that they are high school students taking EK courses. In the first step, the study group consists of a total of 284 students, of which 155 are girls and 79 are boys. The study group for the item analysis of the second step consists of 92 students, 57 of whom are girls and 35 are boys. For the factor analysis of the second step, the study group consists of 385 students, 47% female, and 52.7% male. The factor analysis study group of the second step is the same as the study group of the third step.

The interview form was used as the data collection tool in the first step, the survey in the second step, and the scale and the survey in the third step. Content analysis was used as data analysis in the first step; item analysis, exploratory factor analysis (EFA), and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) in the second step; normality analysis, t-test, ANOVA, and relationship analysis were used in the third step.

In the first step, it can be said that students' positive and negative attitudes towards EK courses stem from three things: teaching-learning process/teacher of the lesson, exam anxiety-failure, and religious reasons.

In the second step, in addition to these three factors, eight other factors were added from the literature, a draft form consisting of 49 items with 11 sub-dimensions was obtained and applied. A total of 31 items were removed from the form, of these 16 were removed in the analysis step and 15 were removed in the factor analysis step. EFA was performed after KMO and Barlett tests and a 3-factor structure was obtained. Item total correlations of items ranged from .31 to .68 and item factor values ranged from .41 to .81. The first factor explains 34.89% of the scale, the second factor explains 8.33% and the third factor explains 6.48%. In total, three factors explain 49.71% of the cases. The first factor is named internal motivation (IM), the second factor is the external motivation (EM) and the third factor is the collaborative motivation (CM). The three-factor model structure of the scale, which was obtained with EFA, was examined with first-level CFA and the fit indices were found to be significant (x2 = 274.01, sd = 132, p = .00, x2 / sd = 2.07). The model fit indexes are accepted as the acceptable value of GFI, CFI, NFI, RFI, IFI and AGFI as .90 and the perfect fit value is 0.95. In this scale, these values were calculated as .93, .98, .96, .95, .98 and .90, respectively. So, the values are acceptable and excellent. Cronbach Alpha values of each factor were calculated: IM factor .84, DM factor .58, IDM factor .77 and total motivation .88. After the second step, a valid and reliable scale was developed toward the EK course.

In the third step, the levels of IM and CM of students for the EK course differ significantly according to the school type and class. The motivation of Anatolian High School students towards the EK course is lower than that of vocational high school students. The motivation of high school 2nd-year students towards the EK course is lower than that of high school first-year students. There are a negative, low level, and significant relationship between students' IM levels toward the EK course, monthly income, and school average. There are a negative, low level, and significant relationship between students' CM levels toward the EK course and monthly income.

As a result, a valid and reliable motivation scale toward the EK course was developed. The researchers were offered the following suggestions about the study: Using the obtained scale in different sample groups, carrying out research on the causes of the findings obtained, and planning of experimental designs for the solution of these problems.