Teacher Power Use in the College Classroom: Turkish Students’ Views

Abstract

The primary focus of this study is to determine the undergraduate student's perceptions of teacher power use (ie, coercive, reward, expert, legitimate, and referent power) and it was also aimed to investigate whether or not student's views differ significantly in terms of gender, class level and department variables. To this end we, firstly, conducted a pilot study to investigate the validity and reliability of the “Teacher Power Use Scale”. Turkish adoptation, validity and reliability studies of the scale were done by data gathered from a total number of 395 undergraduate students. For validity studies, exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses were carried out, and also item-total correlations were estimated. For reliability studies, Cronbach Alpha and test-retest correlation coefficients were estimated. Overall findings demonstrated that Turkish version of the scale had high validity and reliability scores.