Examining Secondary School Students’ Perceptions of Collaboration: A Field Research

Aims: This research aims to investigate collaboration skills perceptions of secondary school students at a public school in Türkiye. Accordingly, the research problem and sub-problems have been formed as follows: How do participants (secondary school students) perceive their collaboration skills? Sub-problems: Do participants’ perceptions of collaboration skills differ significantly depending on their gender, grade and family’s socio-economic status?

Methodology: As the aim of this research is to examine the current status of a given group of people, namely secondary school students in a public school in Türkiye, in terms of a variable, which is perception of collaboration skills, the research employed a quantitative descriptive methodology. A total of 332 students participated in the study and 59.64% of the participants were female (198 students) and 40.36% were male (134 students). The students were distributed according to their grade levels, with 29.52% (98 students) in 5th grade, 22.89% (76 students) in 6th grade, 24.40% (81 students) in 7th grade and 23.19% (77 students) in 8th grade. According to socio-economic status, 43.37% (144 students) had low socio-economic status, 41.27% (137 students) had medium socio-economic status and 15.36% (51 students) had high socio-economic status. The attitudes of secondary school pupils toward collaboration were ascertained by descriptive analysis, and Mann-Whitney U and Kruskal Wallis tests were used for comparisons.

Results: In terms of SSCS, the minimum value is 3.25 and the maximum value is 5. The mean value was 4.45 and the standard deviation was 0.41. This shows that students' attitudes towards collaboration are generally high, and the responses are close to each other. the mean rank value for female students was 213.91 and the total rank value was 49786.50, while the mean rank value for male students was 199.52 and the total rank value was 35213.00. Mann-Whitney U value was 18462,500, p value was .01 and this difference was statistically significant (p < 0.05). the mean rank values of the students according to the grade levels are as follows: 167.45 for 5th grade, 201.94 for 6th grade, 202.16 for 7th grade and 206.19 for 8th grade. Kruskal-Wallis H value is 1,110, df = 3 and p value is ,09, and this difference is not statistically significant (p > 0.05). the mean rank values of the students according to their socio-economic status are as follows: 191,12 for low status, 187,32 for medium status and 201,01 for high status. Kruskal-Wallis H value is 1,201, df = 3 and p value is ,07, and this difference is not statistically significant (p > 0,05).

Conclusion: Secondary school students have moderate to high positive evaluations of collaboration in various dimensions and that these evaluations are more homogeneous in some dimensions and more variable in others. Female students have higher scores than male students in the dimensions of emotional evaluations, cooperation process and attitudes towards cooperation, but there is no significant difference between genders in the dimension of roles and responsibilities. Secondary school students' collaboration skills and related attitudes do not differ significantly according to their grade levels. and socio-economic status.