Özet:

The aim of this study was to examine whether or not the normality assumptions were taken into consideration in defining which statistical methods to use in educational research articles that include statistical analysing procedures; and whether or not these assumptions were taken into account also in the application process; which methods and techniques were used towards the testing of these normality assumptions based on the evaluations on the assumptions; and finally the investigation of what kind of decisions were given in the selection of the appropriate statistical technique. In order to achieve this aim, 788 articles published from 2013 to 2015 in 5 peer-reviewed international journals which are selected according to convenience sampling, one of the non-random sampling methods, are examined. This study was carried out as a descriptive research. An article review form, developed by the researchers, was used as a data collection tool. Frequency and percentage calculations and χ2 independence test for contingency distributions were used for the analysis of the data. According to findings, it was revealed that in 340 articles normality assumption had to be tested and in 133 out of 340 normality assumption were tested and in 40 out of 133 researchers did not report how normality assumption was tested. Descriptive, graphical and hypothesis tests respectively were the most common methods in testing normality assumption. The most common hypothesis tests were Kolmogorov-Smirnov and Shapiro-Wilk, respectively. Most common decision based on normality assumption testing was to use parametric tests on the assurance of normality assumption when normality assumption was a pre-existing condition. On the other hand, there are studies that didn’t meet the normality assumption yet still used parametric tests. As a result of this study, there were serious deficiencies and errors both in the testing of normality assumptions and decision-making related to the statistical methods and techniques to be used in the educational research that the normality assumption needs to be tested.

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