Abstract:

The aim of this study is to adapt university students' the intellectual development scale, which takes the Perry's Model as its basis, into Turkish. The scale, developed by Katung et al. is based on the three stages of Perry's Model (dualism, multiplism, and relativism). The purpose of the scale is to obtain university students' thoughts on some factors (i.e., student, lecturer, the nature of knowledge and examinations) that directly affect the learning processes. Thus, the scale ıs desıgned to determine university students' intellectual development levels. By doing so, instructors will have a chance to both determine their students' intellectual development levels and take appropriate measures in order to promote them to higher intellectual developmental levels. The first step in the study was to get permission from the developers of the scale. Thereafter, the items of the scale were translated into Turkish by the author and another researcher who is familiar with both cultures. The translation validity of the scale was examined by preparing translation harmony rating forms and referring to the views of English and Turkish language experts. Once the final form of the scale had been derived, an English language expert re-translated the items of the scale from Turkish to English. The results obtained from this phase indicated that the Turkish scale closely approximated the original English scale. After the translation and language validity of the scale had been insured, the Turkish scale was administered to 150 volunteer university students (i.e., freshmen, sophomore, junior, and senior) of whom 72 were females and 78 were males. These subjects made up the sample for the reliability analyses of the Turkish scale. The results obtained from this phase were compared to those of the other investigations in which the same scale was used the comparison manifested that the results were in accord. In addition, the Turkish scale was re-applied to a gpoup of freshman students in the sample after one month and test-retest reliability coefficient was found to be .94. It was also accepted that the scale had a natural validity resulting from the process used to develop it.

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