Abstract:

It is an essential skill for pre-service teachers to have the competencies on preparing educational material and developing the course content. The increase in technology use in recent years requires utilization of these new technologies in education and specifically for content development. Within the content of this study, practical tools for content development were defined as internet-based technologies that do not require having any computer programming skills. The aim of the current study is to develop a scale to measure pre-service teachers` competencies and necessity perceptions about using practical tools for content development. The study has been conducted during the spring semester of 2013-2014 academic year. The study group was composed of 203 pre-service teachers from Special Education, Program of Guidance and Psychological Counseling and Department of Computer Education and Instructional Technology. The process of developing the scale included many stages, such as a literature review, taking student opinions through essays, creating an item pool, taking expert opinions, a pretesting study as well as analysis for determining the structural validity and reliability. The Likert type scale had 26 items. The results of explanatory factor analysis showed that the scale has a structure of one dimension and consists of 26 items. It was seen that the factor weights of the scale items varied between 0.753-0.486 for competencies and 0.778-0.571 for necessity. The Cronbach alpha reliability coefficient is α=0.94 for competencies and α=0.96 for necessity. These results indicated that the validity and reliability of the scale were sufficient.  

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