Determination of Classroom Pre-Service Teachers’ State of Personal Innovativeness

Abstract

Today, in every passing moment, a new piece of information is acquired and the accumulation of this information leads to social and technological developments. Therefore, today, individuals are expected to rapidly adjust to innovations. As such, individuals should be open to innovations and willing to adopt innovations; that is, they need to be innovative. In this regard, most of the responsibility for training innovative individuals within formal education should be assumed by classroom teachers as they are working in the first stage of compulsory education. In order to be able train innovative individuals, classroom teachers should posses the characteristics of innovativeness. Therefore, the purpose of the current study was set to be to determine the pre-service classroom teachers’ state of innovativeness and investigate it in relation to different variables. The current study was conducted on 322 pre-service classroom teachers randomly selected from among the classroom teachers attending a university in 2014-2015 academic year. In the collection of the data, “Personal Innovativeness Scale” adapted to Turkish by Kılıçer and Odabaşı (2010) was employed. In the current study, the internal consistency of the scale was found to be .74. At the end of the study, it was found that the pre-service classroom teachers’ mean personal innovativeness level is medium and the state of their innovativeness varies depending on gender in favor of the female pre-service teachers. Moreover, the male pre-service teachers were found to be more resistant to change than the female pre-service teachers. The grade level and academic achievement variables were found to be not significantly affecting the pre-service classroom teachers’ state of innovativeness. In light of these findings, it was suggested that pre-service teachers should be given adequate training during their pre-service education so that they could design activities to educate their prospective students as innovative individuals.