Masoumeh Akbari; Shahla Farhadi Varmazabadi; Mahmoud Meidani; Azadeh Barzgaran; Shahin Abdulmaleki
Abstract
Purpose: Investigating the educational needs of different groups always helps to better understand the current situation and to have a good perspective on the future. Therefore, the purpose of this research was studying the educational needs of elementary school principals based on the professional competencies.Methodology: ...
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Purpose: Investigating the educational needs of different groups always helps to better understand the current situation and to have a good perspective on the future. Therefore, the purpose of this research was studying the educational needs of elementary school principals based on the professional competencies.Methodology: This research in terms of purpose was applied and in terms of purpose implementation method was descriptive from type of survey. The research population was public elementary school principals of Alborz province with number 584 people (381 women and 203 men) in the 2017-18 academic years. The research sample was 231 managers who were selected by multi -stage cluster sampling method. The research tool was educational needs of principals based on professional competencies with 89 items that designed by the present study researchers. For data analysis were used from exploratory factor analysis and chi-square test in SPSS-19 software.Findings: The findings showed that for the educational needs of elementary school principals based on the professional competencies were identified 8 factors of management expertise, knowledge of teacher skills, perceptive-human skills, artistic skills, moral-social skills, technical skills, motivational skills and knowledge of physical space standards of schools and the factor loading of all items was higher than 0.40. Also, the factor load of all factors was higher than 0.50, the average variance extracted of all factors was higher than 0.60, and the reliability of all factors with using Cronbach's alpha and combined methods was higher than 0.80, and the reliability of the whole tool with using Cronbach's alpha method was estimated 0.91. In addition, according to the elementary school principals there was a significant difference between the amount of observed value and the amount of expected value in all 8 identified needs (management expertise, knowledge of teacher skills, perceptive-human skills, artistic skills, moral-social skills, technical skills, motivational skills and knowledge of physical space standards of schools) (P